YOUTH LAGOON at Lee’s Palace, Saturday, March 31. Rating: NNN
Though his debut album, The Year of Hibernation, is barely six months old, Youth Lagoon (a.k.a. 22-year-old Boise native Trevor Powers) faces a familiar problem for many bedroom artists that have blown up too quickly: how best to represent music created in seclusion for a capacity crowd of adoring fans.
Put together a full rock band and the songs lose their essential intimacy, but rely too heavy on prerecorded music and the live show can seem like a half-baked alternative to just listening on a decent pair of headphones.
In front of a packed house, Youth Lagoon fell somewhere in the middle. Powers spent the entire Lee’s Palace set seated in front of a keyboard, while accompanying guitarist Logan Hyde helped fill out the sound. The remaining pieces of arrangement came from sequenced drum and bass beats that Powers triggered mid-song.
Such non-organic concessions are often the pitfall of this kind of performance, but dialed up in volume the prerecorded bits actually provided the majority of the band’s muscle. Far from meek, the low end was often powerful enough to be felt in the pit of your stomach. Otherwise, the songs’ most distinctive element were their most human element – Powers’ voice – a fragile, damaged falsetto that grounds the music in their makeup as semi-traditional singer/songwriter compositions.
Still, despite the surprisingly vocal audience’s familiarity with each track, it was hard to ignore that they all essentially followed the same formula: Powers warbling over warm keys, a controlled guitar line and the eventual swell of drum and bass. Given the minimal setup and soft-rock, easy-listening vibes, the exuberant fan reaction often felt strangely disproportionate.
Youth Lagoon’s distinct intimate-yet-epic aesthetic is a tough one to recreate and though he’s done a decent job with limited pieces, it still seems like a work in progress. After selling out venues like Lee’s Palace, shelling out for a live drummer would be a wise next move.
