Richard Youngs has made so many records, both on his own and with collaborators, that it's tempting to hear each new release from him as a sort of checking-in. But he's also a fine and patient formalist, most of whose work is built on formal constraints; a typical Youngs record from his Jagjaguwar era is an extended exploration of a particular idea, usually meditative and melodic, "singer-songwriter" music from a distance but rather more peculiar when you pay close attention.
Before long, the second voice deviates a little from what the first is singing, or sings a different note or two, or a single voice may actually be enhanced by delay and echo. "One Hundred Stranded Horses" introduces a third voice, interrupting the first two mid-verse to interject a few related lines of its own. "How many horses in the wood?" Youngs sings. "How many running free? How many horses are in the bay, and how many on TV?" (The song was written in 2006, too early to be a response to M.I.A.'s "Boyz", but you can sing it to the same tune if you like.)
These songs are more or less of a piece-- Youngs' lyrics are evocative but nonspecific ("sound through the night and the color of day"), and he repeats and shuffles individual phrases, sometimes altering them a little, weighing each one for its value. As usual, Youngs takes his time getting where he's going, playing simple repeating riffs and creeping forward to the next chord whenever it pleases him. The guitar part to "Paths in the City" is nothing more than a five-note figure, duplicated hundreds of times (by hand, or digitally? it's hard to tell) and scattered in clumps until it sounds like a bizarre set of wind chimes. The shortest song here is under a minute and a half long; the longest, the concluding "Something Like Air", is more than 16 minutes long, and doesn't seem appreciably longer. By the end of that final piece, Youngs' voices have diverged from each other almost completely in words and tone, as if the song they're singing is no longer the same. It's a static record, even by Youngs' standards, but its near-stasis is the source of its loveliness. You can let it run its duration, hearing the slow moiré patterns rippling over its surface while you wait for something to happen, or you can focus on it and be swept away by how alive and complicated those ripples are.
