The spate of albums Richard Youngs has made for Jagjaguwar-- nine in the past 11 years-- have covered a range of sounds and ideas. But there's something single-minded, even monastic about the way he's made each one. Typically, he focuses devoutly on a single approach, sticking with the same instrumentation, tempos, and tones from track to track. Even records that could be considered outliers-- take last year's pop-oriented Beyond the Valley of the Ultrahits-- have a core personality that make adjacent songs like fraternal twins.
Amplifying Host takes that genetic consistency to a microscopic level. I needed multiple listens to tell these six songs apart, all of which generally start the same way-- with a slow, bent note-- and are built from the same parts: long electric guitar twangs, gentle acoustic strums, big bass rumbles, and Youngs' deliberate, extended-syllable singing. They also include drumming from Damon Krukowski (of Galaxie 500 and Damon and Naomi), but he's so backgrounded I didn't initially notice his contributions, which are primarily atmospheric cymbal washes.
Whatever elements are there, Youngs' vocals are the center, in ways good and... well, never bad, but sometimes perplexing. He's often found success with more formal singing modes-- take the chant-like melodic lines of 2009's Under Stellar Steam-- but here he's more interested in deviating from the paths he lays. He'll sing a line, vary it slightly, wander away, then curve back close to but not exactly where he started. Floating between form and improvisation, he mixes the searching quality of Bill Callahan with the stubborn dodge of Jandek. Which makes songs like the pensive "Tessellations" or the simple "Too Strong for the Power"-- which feels a lot longer than its 13 minute duration-- both enticing and maddening. Youngs always sounds like he's going to coalesce his lines into a climactic chorus, but his angles never quite straighten, instead birthing even more tangents.
I'm probably making Amplifying Host sound more difficult than it is. The bulk is warm and inviting, as hypnotic as any Youngs record. Let it envelop you without worrying about where it's going, and it'll massage your brain even as it evades it. If you do find Youngs' skewed perspective frustrating, there's a reward at the end. On "This Is the Music", he allows himself a true chorus: "This is the sunshine of generations/ Music of exaltation/ This is the time of fulfillment." The music's measured rhythm and plaintive chords may belie those bright sentiments, but if everything lined up perfectly, this wouldn't be Richard Youngs.
