Review: Young & Sick - Young & Sick
[Harvest Records; 2014]
Rating: 4.5/10
By Xavier Veccia, Features Editor
Key Tracks: “Gloom,” “Feel Pain”
To paraphrase The Buggles, shuffling has killed the album star.
The music landscape used to be all about putting together a cohesive collection of songs that fit together as the larger whole that is an album. Nowadays, it’s much easier to skip songs when listening to an album, making it less important for artists to make albums flow. Now, they can just make a collection of potential singles. And they have.
Young & Sick is one of those artists who take advantage of the new way music is played. But when he does this, it’s more of a boring mashup of songs that, separately, would be pretty good.
Even for those who have never heard any of Nick Van Hofwegen’s work, there’s a pretty decent chance they’ve seen it. Along with his own extremely red album cover, he’s also made covers for the likes of Maroon 5 and Foster the People.
Young & Sick is sort of Van Hofwegen’s combined ventures between art and music. And he’s pretty talented at both.
Like his art, Young & Sick’s music is quite different from most of what one would hear. It’s sort of like indie-pop-R&B, meeting somewhere in between The Weeknd and, well, his buddies Foster the People. With a high-pitched voice and synthy tunes, it’s easy to find oneself immersed in Van Hofwegen’s songs.
However, once again like his art, all of his songs share very core stylistic similarities which makes songs run together without much rhyme or reason. This is a major problem on his self-titled album: whether the listener is playing the album in order or at random, it’s easy to get the songs confused.
Take the bookends of the album, the first track “Mangrove” and the last “Twentysomething.” When dissecting the songs, it’s not too hard to spot the difference. “Mangrove” has a gospel-like quality while “Twentysomething” reflects traditional R&B. But at the same time, both also rely so heavily on Van Hofwegen’s heavily synthesized voice and bubbly sound effects that they become a little too similar. And this takes place across most of the album.
That’s not to say there’s not some stand-out tracks on Young & Sick, though. There’s a particularly good stretch around the middle of the album featuring the tribal-meets-synth-pop “Feel Pain” and the jazzy “Gloom.” And it’s when Van Hofwegen is even more different than his typically different self that he reaches new heights as an artist.
As in his art, Young & Sick creates an imaginary world following imaginary laws of nature to life with his self-titled album. He might even be too good at this, actually, as the listener simply accepts these false laws of nature--the bubbly synths, distinct voice and overall weirdness--as reality. It’s like if one was to paint a town pink. At first it would be exciting and interesting, but it would soon become monotonous. Young & Sick may be exciting at first, but one can only handle so many pink buildings.
