Category Archives: Music journalism

scan here, transcript below:

Launching into ‘The Delaney’ and a set undoubtedly the highlight of many people’s weekends, it was difficult to believe that the almost immortal sight of Carl and Pete onstage seemed, for many years, one banished to rock ‘n roll history.

Far from the magnets of tabloid newspaper hue and cry they were when they first visited Sheffield, though, tonight’s performance from the on-off soulmates saw them deliver a set of old favourites with a more relaxed, and dare I say it, mature demeanour.

Being a Libertines gig, however, it could never threaten to pass without incident, and their typical abandon and improvisation saw them navigate through a minor technical hiccup and vaguely inclement weather with very little difficulty.

They are seasoned professionals by now, after all, and there are few things a singalong to ‘What Katie Did’ cannot fix.

Riling the crowd with the timeless anthems ‘Don’t Look Back Into The Sun’ and ‘Can’t Stand Me Now’, you didn’t have to be one of the several in attendance wearing Up The Bracket marching band uniform to know all the classics, and what was unarguably a ‘legend’s slot’ was answered with a performance firmly reminiscent of all the bits of the Albion boys from way back in the day.

A gesture somewhat apposite for his meticulous approach to music-making, in 2017–2019 Chilean-American electronic composer Nicholas Jaar makes a punctual two-years-to-the-day revisit of the ‘Against All Logic’ alias he debuted with the 2012–2017 collection.

I don’t seem to be alone in preferring this sample-focused side-project to Jaar’s wider body of work; it’s less cerebral, perhaps, but there’s something brought out of him when he toys with random snippets from the last forty years of music and film that leaves us with a more varied, and undeniably more exciting, listening experience.

The clearest difference between this album and the one that preceded it, a mood noticeable without any kind of prior context in fact, is the urgency you hear on 2017-19 – a reflection of how much the world around him accelerated between the two periods, it’s tempting to say.

Creating a wonky and at other points aggressive bass soundscape to climb from ‘Fantasy’ to the apex of the seventh track ‘Deefer’, there’s a tense energy to this thirty-minute ascent that flatters the long-play format, forming a not-too-on-the-nose sense of progression that invites attention all the way along.

This is impressive, because it often tends to be quite difficult for artists to play off so many soundbites against each other for the length of an entire album without it all sounding a bit incoherent, mismatched, or worse, just annoying. The likes of The Avalanches and Boards of Canada managed to make this work a couple of decades ago by casting samples around an overarching theme of woozy atemporal haunting, but Jaar takes a different tack, instead casting a spine through these tracks with some of the atmosphere building many will recognise from his extended club mixes.

Particularly strong sellers on here come in the form of opener ‘Fantasy’, which bounces at a leisurely pace through some Senni-esque breaks and arpeggios before falling into the darkness of the rest of the record, and ‘If You Can’t Do It Good, Do It Hard’, a riff on a monologue by no-wave icon Lydia Lunch that’s probably the most techno-y number Jaar’s done under this moniker to date.

An album that feels like an answer to and a complete rejection of the sunny disposition of its predecessor, this short serving is another well made case for Nicholas Jaar’s continued celebrity within the world of electronic music, and a release that just about manages to distil the finer idiosyncrasies of the late 2010s post-club movement.

For what it is, you can’t say Youth is Only Ever Fun in Retrospect is a particularly bad album, especially being a debut. It’s aimed, with incredible precision, at the ‘indie teen’ market, and does a fine job at doing so – the songs are energetic, the choruses catchy and the production impressive. This group are also, I can attest to, good fun to experience live.

The sticking point I’m afraid is just how inconsequential it all is. There’s nothing fresh, nothing original, nothing surprising offered here. It also ranks rather high on the scale of sameyness. In fact, for the most part this could be genuinely be 45 minutes of the same track, and you do have to be paying attention at many points to note where one ends and the next begins. This would be fine if it was the desired effect, but something tells me this is a more of a symptom of levelling out in the studio, and attempting to crowd the radio-friendly middleground.

One listen, while unlikely to an entirely unenjoyable one, should probably be enough.