Nature’s Call
FOLK
Conner Youngblood
Cheyenne
There are a lot of quotes about adventure — the ones you see on wall art and coasters — that feel relevant when characterizing Conner Youngblood’s debut LP Cheyenne. Youngblood drew from his travel experiences, or in some cases just the idea of travelling, when he wrote Cheyenne, and illuminates these adventures with a lush sonic terrain of his own making. The 30 different instruments that Youngblood plays compose a soft folky melange, but occasionally a crunchy electronic beat adds a touch of harshness. A harp twinkles on “Stockholm” and a bass clarinet sighs mournfully on “Lemonade.” The sonic layers of “Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge” and “The Birds of Finland,” both album highlights, are built on the backs of picked acoustic guitar melodies as Youngblood becomes intertwined in a dizzying dance with his instrumentation.
In spite of the resplendence of the album, Youngblood is soft-spoken; his hushed words are curious observational fragments. Sometimes Youngblood’s voice is so layered and warped that he gets lost in the sonic density, but he’s on a mission to find stable ground. By album’s end, the rationale behind Youngblood’s exploring becomes clearer when, on “Pizza Body” — a lighthearted play on the song’s repeated phrase “be
world” where they might not find the answers, but certainly plead and ponder. The Toronto band’s Lockin’ Out Records debut, Changes, is a significant hardcore-punk proclamation armed with sagacious emotion. Contemplating the hostility of man on “All Against All,” vocalist Andrew Peden utters “We know compassion is instrumental / In a system where it’s either him or me.”
Mil-Spec meet between the momentous works of Fury and no-frills vitality of Mental, but are mostly progressive in sound and thought. Changes is a work of discerning physical and emotional labour, but spend too much time comparing Mil-Spec to something they’re not and you’ll miss out on their poetic and devastating contrast. (Lockin’ Out, www.lockinout.com)
ROCK somebody” — Youngblood encourages growth: “You wanna be somebody? Then do something about it.” Although the rich details of Cheyenne can at times leave you disoriented, Youngblood’s debut is a dazzling journey. (Counter, counterrecords.com)
Do you assemble each track’s instrumentation layer by layer?
Yeah, and sometimes after building layer upon layer and it’s almost finished or it’s at a point where I’m not even sure where it’s going, I end up deleting ten out of 12 layers, or 50 out of 60, and [I] realize that these layers sound better on their own than any of the other stuff I made. So I just delete it all and I keep going with whatever sounds best. It ends up taking quite a bit of time.
You’ve released some striking music videos. Are you drawn to visual stimuli as much as audio?
Definitely. While I’m creating the songs in the studio, I’m watching movies the entire time, and then I go home and just watch movies and think about the songs I’ve made. Or I’m working on songs on my laptop while watching movies. It’s a constant rotation of visual stimuli. I definitely wanted to be a director before a musician.