The Violent Youth
tsvety
Artoffact Records
German/Belarus duo The Violent Youth have been releasing music for a decade now, and while the obvious musical points of comparison are to bleak former Eastern Bloc post-punk acts like Molchat Doma, Arthur Tsymbal and Julian Riegel’s new record tsvetsy is simultaneously darker and lusher in character than their preceding albums.
While the particular style of brutalist darkwave The Violent Youth are dealing in has been a well-represented quantity in recent years (thanks in no small part to a few acts inexplicably blowing up via social media), there’s a depressive edge to this material that gives it an appropriate gravitas. Where “potselui” has a spritely rhythm track and makes good use of vibraphone sounds for some pop appeal, its chorused guitar churn and grave vocals plant it firmly into gloomy territory. That’s undoubtedly by design, as even when they have an honest to god hook, as on the synth-led “sledy”, they slather the song in dark reverbs that barely allow instruments to poke their heads above the waves before getting sucked back under. This results in some particularly heavy and gothic sounding tracks that are in danger of collapsing under the weight of being so somber; “luna” is a mid-tempo number, but so lugubrious in mood it feels like its moving in slow motion.
For all that moroseness, The Violent Youth manage to avoid being a bummer to listen to. Partially that’s due to a sprinkling of genuinely bright moments, with the likes of “horosho” invoking the melancholic pop-appeal of bands like House of Harm via its sparkly lead and lightly played guitar lines. But more than that, it’s the pace and structure of the record that keeps it from sounding overly ponderous; song lengths are kept around four minutes and under, and are largely served by simple, fast moving drums that cut through the shadowy mix, accenting the melodic cuts like closer “luna” and adding weight to the heavier numbers like driving mechanized title track.
Ultimately The Violent Youth are largely able to make the contradictions of their approach into a virtue rather than a detriment; tsvety is largely too grim to grab folks in the same way a lot of their European post-punk peers have managed, but the pop touches and brief moments where the sun peaks out from behind cloud cover are enough to keep the listening experience from being onerous. When the mood for something this downbeat strikes, it’ll be a nice record to have close at hand.
