Young Marble Giants - Colossal Youth (1980)
Artist: Young Marble Giants
Author: Sarah
Date: 10/15/2024
Listen: Apple Music | Spotify
Everyone always talks about how minimalist this album sounds compared to its punk contemporaries, but something I don't think I've ever seen is a discussion of why it sounds the way it does. Luckily, I have a theory of my own, and you're all going to hear about it.
Everyone already knows that that early wave of punk was all aggression and anger, we're not gonna go into detail with that. But then you listen to Young Marble Giants, and it feels almost like all the emotion has been drained out of it. Is it actually unemotional? Of course not: for example, "Include Me Out" is a pretty vehement rebuke of an ex-lover, "Eating Noddemix" is both a recounting of getting ready in the morning and acatalog of horrific disasters, even the melancholy of recognizing your child's growing independence in "N.I.T.A.".
All of these songs are delivered in the same detached way, but it's not unemotional in the sense that the feelings aren't there. It's more that it's unemotional in the sense that they're so beaten down that they're dissociated from their emotions. Notable Young Marble Giant fan Kurt Cobain's line "I miss the comfort of being sad" wouldn't be totally out of place on this album, in that sense (though his delivery wouldn't fit at all, of course).
In that sense, I think it kind of reminds me of Beat Happening's self-titled, actually? They both kinda get reduced to like "that charmingly minimalist album" in their own different ways, but that reduction to being just their sound totally misses out on the actual point of the album. It's almost like everyone's ability to recognize this kind of thing goes out the window when it's a "cute" album.