Do not be fooled by the triangles and female nudity on the album cover: San Francisco's Young Prisms have absolutely nothing to do with witch house or whatever. The contents in their cauldron: shadowy, reverb-smothered guitar rock-- something that's never been in short supply, sure, but that doesn't diminish how well-timed the band's debut LP, Friends For Now, feels. In case your issue of Indie Rock Gossip ended up in your neighbor's mailbox last month, the knotty Canadian indie rockers in Women spectacularly dismantled on stage at the tail end of 2010, leaving a potential void for similarly styled up-and-comers to take their place while the band works their shit out.
In a sense, Young Prisms are perfect placeholders; they seem to favor complexity and confusion above all else, and the notable moments of Friends For Now find the band utilizing those elements like able chemists. Not so fast, though: It seems the band forgot that while you're making music, it's a good idea to have some hooks. Instead, the record's leaden; as a straight-through listen, it plays like a monolith-- massive and somewhat uninteresting. Every once in a while, an enjoyable part of the record's whole emerges from the murk-- the menacing Sonic Youth-y guitar line that emerges in the middle of "Feel Fine", or the way that the submerged melody of "In Your Room" breathes like curtains near an open window. Otherwise, the fact that this 36-minute record plays like it's twice as long means that something went wrong here.
As with a lot of bands of late, their vocalists, Giovanni Betteo and Stefanie Hodapp, are dragging them down. Just the fact that you need a Google search to tell that more than one person sings in Young Prisms is the reddest of red flags. Their personality-bereft voices take on a chameleonic quality in which, when surrounded by the accompanying music, they eventually become nothing at all. It's possible that the lack of inspiring melodies is a reason why there's no passion in their performances-- alternately, as the maxim of "Sugar" states, "I'm still high/ I'm still alive." With those extremely modest goals checked off the list, it's unclear if Young Prisms care much about accomplishing much else for the time being.
