As punk rock was quickly morphing into post-punk at the end of the '70s, Welsh trio
Young Marble Giants went against the amplified aggression and stylistic chaos of many of their peers, instead creating new worlds of expression through subtraction. The band's vacuous sound was almost jarringly minimal, with incredibly catchy songs consisting of
Alison Statton's stoic vocals, fluid electric bass, unwavering skeletal drum machine rhythms, and the occasional stab of guitar or haunted organ sounds. The group were short-lived, leaving behind only a few EPs, demos, and
Colossal Youth, their sole full-length album from 1980, but their influence would ripple out to inform the sounds of future independent music creators from
Nirvana to
Belle and Sebastian.
Colossal Youth perfectly captures the band's unique approach, with 15 short songs of their stark but rough-edged pop. Before forming
Young Marble Giants,
Statton and brothers
Philip and
Stuart Moxham had all played together in a band called
True Wheel, who took their name from the title of a song on
Brian Eno's 1974 outing
Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). While
Eno's flirtations with funk and
Kraftwerk's bare-bones electronic rhythms were reference points for
Young Marble Giants' sound, it's hard to locate many other implicit influences on
Colossal Youth. The sinister crawl of "N.I.T.A." and lonely riffing of "Music for Evenings" could serve as foundations for the songs of other post-punk bands, but few dared to present something so intentionally empty. The album's most conventionally structured songs -- tunes like atmospheric opener "Searching for Mr. Right" or the would-be rock & roll of "Credit in the Straight World" -- are defined by the sharp tension created by their unfinished-feeling arrangements. That moody tension co-exists with relatively cheery songwriting throughout
Colossal Youth, maintaining a strange balance between the two contrasting energies for the entire album.
Young Marble Giants weren't the only band to explore pop minimalism, but no one else during their time or afterwards quite captured the eerie beauty that floats through every moment of
Colossal Youth. Its songs sound like a private party in an empty house, with every facet of the sound aiming to take up as little space as possible. Listening to
Colossal Youth, it's easy to see how this introverted album full of tiny sounds made such an enormous impact. ~ Fred Thomas
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