Young Jesus leader John Rossiter writes essays for The Los Angeles Review of Books about viewing the NBA as a socioeconomic metaphor. In interviews, he talks about Crass and the non-narcotic uses of mushrooms. He works at a celebrated California bookstore, and only camp counselors seem more excited about their jobs. Maybe that all seems as imposing as Young Jesus’ new album, The Whole Thing Is Just There—six songs, 49 minutes, sprees of knotty improvisations within rock tunes. But there’s an endearing transparency to Young Jesus’ competing personality quirks. They’re the grad student at a Big Ten university who reads books about jazz improvisation while manning a DSA table on campus before getting drunk at the five-act indie rock house show. A sort of philosophy jam band that riffs on ideology and politics instead of actual solos, Young Jesus are audacious but accessible, instantly likable even at their most esoteric.
Except the last Young Jesus album, 2017’s S/T, there’s nothing else really like The Whole Thing Is Just There around. Even that one was far removed from the albums made by the Chicago-based version of Young Jesus, a Midwestern crossbreed suited for anyone who wanted the Hold Steady to lead an emo revival. S/T was the first work Rossiter finished in Los Angeles, and it sounded absolutely nothing like its surroundings. Pivoting into post-rock landscapes both beautiful and barren, it was as cold as the desert at night or warm as the sun glaring off the frozen tundra.
But Young Jesus hadn’t quite unraveled the paradox of how to be intentional about its improvisation, so S/T came in uneven segments. On The Whole Thing Is Just There, the separation between the songs and the jams is mostly gone. Putting aside the 21-minute closer “Gulf,” the preceding half-hour is evenly split among five tracks, which doesn’t radically alter Young Jesus’ songwriting process. They’re just doing everything with more volume and confidence.
Signing to Saddle Creek for the re-release of S/T and the release of The Whole Thing Is Just There is a realization of Rossiter’s drunken 20-something dreams. While Young Jesus are more likely to reference Bill Orcutt and Albert Ayler than Conor Oberst these days, they haven’t forfeited the perpetually yearning quality of landlocked emo. Regardless of wave or variant, the Midwestern stuff is music for searchers, channeling the impossibility of true fulfillment through imperfect voices striving for a note always out of reach. That is here, as is a dose of self-deprecation. Young Jesus recognize the potential for unintentional humor when name-dropping Very Serious Art. “Saganism vs. Buddhism” surveys the assumed dissonance between science and spirituality and begins with a third-eye lyric. It risks turning into Live or Ab-Soul before Rossiter sighs in a deader-than-deadpan lilt, “I have begun contacting various mystics/I have begun buying rocks in stores.”
While it’s easy to focus on Young Jesus’ long songs or high concepts, “For Nana” should combat any assumptions that these pieces are inaccessible or overly challenging. Rossiter brought it into the studio as a wisp of an idea written after watching his grandmother die. “When you leave the room/I wonder how a heart exists beyond the beat,” Rossiter moans over tentative, gauzy guitars, coos outlining his question. Young Jesus spend the improv section trying to imagine a soul leaving its body.
Rossiter leads a current events workshop at Skylight Books and I imagine most of the discussions take on a similar trajectory to the songs on The Whole Thing Is Just There. They start with a welcoming remark and an introduction to a monolithic subject, establishing a conversational flow that honors everyone’s ideas and risks pure entropy before bringing it to a harmonious closure. During the first and final minute of any song here, Young Jesus suggest conventional indie rock. The mordant piano intro of “Saganism vs. Buddhism” could pass for the National. Over a doom-metal churn, “Deterritory” matches their half-twee, half-anarcho-punk philosophy of resisting cynicism by holding hands and raising fists. After a spry midsection of double-time drums and escalating yells, Rossiter returns to the opening theme of “Deterritory,” yelling, “It’s not enough to hate the world we live in!” A cymbal crash brings the song to a startling halt. It is as mesmerizing as watching a stadium implode in slow motion, as affirming as replacing it with a community center.
The feeling of S/T and The Whole Thing Are Just There inspire references to similarly uncompromising slabs of post-rock: Spiderland, Perfect From Now On, early Modest Mouse, and late Talk Talk, reflecting a nostalgia for a time when indie felt less beholden to fashion and narrative and more to mere ideas. The Whole Thing Is Just There is not an album from which Young Jesus can “level up” or whatever, because that would require forgoing the stream-of-consciousness improv of “Fourth Zone of Gaits” or the making of “Gulf,” a song Rossiter joked will be listened to in full by maybe five people. (He didn’t say if the four members of Young Jesus were included.)
A six-minute song that expanded into more than 20 while Young Jesus were in the studio, “Gulf” is Rossiter’s lament for “a century moving much too quickly.” It followed a writing-and-recording process that grappled with the same issues as basically every other indie rock band in 2018: Is playing my music a worthwhile pursuit in this political moment? Does my art and presence take up an unnecessary amount of space? Should I be making any kind of art when there’s so much more to be done? Not every single second of “Gulf” feels completely essential, but the entirety is. Young Jesus ask themselves thousands of questions, and they have the only proven solution—the release of pervasive self-doubt and anxiety is in the doing, the creating.
