I have fallen down a Youth Lagoon rabbit hole and I am enjoying it immensely.

I love an album that comes from a different place, a different story or perspective. One of my favourite albums of last year was built out of a cache of love letters that an elderly lady left behind after she passed away. Here Trevor Powers, aka ‘Youth Lagoon,’ uses a set of old home movie tapes that he found in his parent’s garage to construct an album around. “When I took the tapes home and popped in the first one, it was my brother Bobby and I at the state fair. I was 4 years old choking on a corn dog,” he laughs. “If anything’s a summary of life, that is. What I was really consumed with was how much I could zoom in on my actual history,” says Powers. “I wanted to really make someone feel like they were inside my living room in 1993, but rearrange the furniture a bit. Something about combining that level of hyperreality with fairytales of devils and detectives weirdly felt like the truest way to immortalize these pieces of my family.”

This is less a collection of songs than a soundscape. The main instrument is a tinkling piano or keyboard synths that slots into an air of nostalgia and whimsey. Snatches of the videos themselves blend into the background of tracks, giving small insights into the life of the family. ‘Speed Freak’ does not fit in as neatly, most clearly the strongest single off the album and a really good track but it does slightly break the overall spell that is cast over the listener with its more insistent beat and different angle. “This song came from a thought I had of giving the angel of death a hug,” Powers says. “We spend our whole lives running from this thing we can’t outrun. This body is temporary, but there is no death. Only transformation. A door opens when you learn to let go of the identity you’ve been building your whole life.“

‘Football’ quickly reestablishes the mood and paints an intriguing vignette. “They put it on me, don’t put it on me. Maybe another person cut the football.” This album contains those inconsequential moments of childhood that feel like absolute life and death at the time. On ‘Seersucker’ we are made accomplices to the most personal experiences of family hardship, “Every song that Momma wrote Pop learned to play, When the old piano broke the music went away… Jesus Christ, we’re doing alright, we’re doing alright.”

At times the drumming moves into more of a hip-hop style, but the overall feel of the tracks stays lowkey and intimate. This is an absolutely beautiful album that you can lose yourself within and drift off into another person’s lived experience. I was not familiar with Youth Lagoon before this, I will be going through the back catalogue in detail after this wonderful experience.