Blame it on the Youth is not a CD. The bright red sticker on the front will tell you that instead it's The World's First DVD-only Album. No audio disc comes packaged with The Sun's debut album, only a DVD with videos for each of its 14 songs. You can rip .WAV files from the disc with the DVD-ROM drive of your computer, or purchase mp3s from iTunes or other digital vendors, but put it into your car or home stereo and all you'll hear is the faint whirr of useless plastic spinning in place.
The band decided that a DualDisc or an audio/video package-- a route taken by artists as disparate as Super Furry Animals, Wire, and 50 Cent-- would be too costly. Admitting to leaking their record tp p2p networks five months before its release, their choice acknowledges and tacitly encourages file-sharing, while trying to give the consumer a package to get excited about. But aren't there a number of people who buy CDs, yet don't have DVD-ROM drives in their computer? And don't they download most of their music, legally or otherwise?
The videos were reportedly put together on the cheap, using handheld cameras and pooling volunteers from Craigslist. Some are undeniably amateurish, but "Justice", "Waiting on High", or "Valentine" all feature competent lighting and editing production values. There's even some ingenuity to the racy shoot for "Romantic Death", which splices together grainy shots of men and women facing the camera while masturbating (from the shoulders up). "2B4" or "We Try" are a little less creative with their limited budget, and the animated collage for "Taking the Lord's Name in Vein", full of blunt political imagery, would have been better off with just straight performance shots.
"Lose Your Money" is a continuous shot of a man sitting, staring at a mirror and a bottle of wine, while half-heartedly mouthing the song's lyrics in between sips of alcohol. He lights a cigarette and rubs his brow, then it ends suddenly with an inscrutable montage of color-saturated nature imagery. It's trite, self-involved, Film Production 101 fare-- yet I've had nights just like it, with songs plenty more embarrassing than the dirge-y "Lose Your Money". The director took a risk, and I can't deny my sentimental reaction.
I wish I could say the same for the songs. Not that Blame it on the Youth lacks catchy melodies, or that they're aren't meticulous arrangements under the hooks. The band executes polite slices of pop like "Justice" and "We Try" with precision, but the moments of supposed catharsis-- the red-faced screaming through the third verse of "Must be You", or the flubbed guitar solo and thrashy finale of "Say Goodbye"-- come off as forced. Even the borderline freakout "Taking the Lords Name in Vein" sounds rehearsed and mannered. Try as they might, the Sun just can't seem to sweat or get dirty on Blame it on the Youth.
I'm not just reviewing a batch of songs here, I'm reviewing a DVD that a good section of the buying public can't even listen to without watching TV for an hour. While there's a broad palette of sounds and images to be found, their multi-pronged multimedia gamble just points toward my main complaint with Blame it on the Youth: The Sun want to master all the mediums, but they don't have much to say.
