Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Youth is meant to be carefree, exciting times of discovery and hope, of adventure and love, it is the time you are supposed to relish before the burdens and responsibilities of adulthood take their toll and add grey hairs and wisdom to your mind. Youth is never wasted on the young, for they are the ones to whom the world really belongs as those over a certain age seek comfort in their homely rituals and planned out to the minute lives.
Youth is meant to be a time of beauty, and yet as London’s The Yacht Club discover through the release of their debut album, The Last Words That You Said To Me Have Kept Me Here And Safe, is one which reflects deeply and with the untarnished truth of what we as a society now expect of the young, constant exams when they are too young, the badgering and mocking of their ideals and dreams, and how they choose to live, and leave this life.
It is an album born of the struggle to understand, of the unrequited love for something different, humble in its approach to searching for the beauty within such experience of thought and the pressure of a group of friends dealing with a person’s final moment of clarity and rolled up desperation in which the only answer is to leave further questions still in the air.
The Last Words That You Said To Me Have Kept Me Here And Safe reflects on these thoughts with determination to find a way through the emotions left behind, a warren, a maze of conflictions in which your own mind magnifies all that could be and how someone else’s passing effects your soul. The remarkable music and candour might be one that some shy away from, and yet if we don’t talk about such moments, such possibilities, then it becomes a marked one-way street in which people find themselves trapped with no hope of ever seeing the way out of.
In tracks such as Heigham Park, Glue, Get Your Damn Hands Off Her!, Broken Things and 21, Marcus Gooda, Jack Holland, Alex Bramwell, Alexander Esp see the positivity of coping with grief come to fruition, it is a reminder that by talking through our emotions that it is possible to see a flower in a desert bloom and relish the thought of one day seeing a garden instead of course, unforgiving sand.
An album which tackles head on what it means to lose someone, a friend, someone you call family, one that never glorifies or disdains the act in which loss comes about, but one that asks the pertinent question, of how to deal with the emotions found.
The Yacht Club release The Last Words That You Said To Me Have Kept Me Here And Safe on January 25th via Beth Shalom Records.
Ian D. Hall