Youth Lagoon’s new album is called Wondrous Bughouse. The word “bughouse” is a slightly archaic term
that was sometimes used to describe an insane asylum. By extension, it was also
sometimes used as an adjective. I.e.: That man in the street ripping Eggo waffles
in half in his pajamas is “bughouse.” (In more modern parlance, people
sometimes do still “bug out.”) But a “wondrous” bughouse might be something
slightly different.
Taken more literally, a “bughouse” if you try to imagine it,
might look like a child’s terrarium with lots of little organisms in it and
some leaves and grass and maybe a stick. It might not seem very “wondrous” to us,
as adult, human, outside observers. But to its inhabitants, such a world would be
positively awe-inspiring and/or impossible to comprehend. To the bugs in a
terrarium that plastic box is their universe and they’ll never know any
different. The humans looking in on them might not be very amazed, but the
unimaginable beings looking in on our awe-inspiring, impossible-to-comprehend
human-world might not be very amazed by us either. It doesn’t make it any less
wondrous to us though.
Maybe these metaphysical contemplations are what send some terrestrial
bughouse residents to institutional bughouses in the first place. Hopefully,
though, it causes us (as it seemingly has for Youth Lagoon's Trevor Powers) to do something more productive, like make an album about
the enigmatic, unfathomable nature of our world and the life that inhabits it.
Wondrous Bughouse starts with “Through Mind and Back,” an
instrumental track that gives some indication of the territory about to be
traversed. The song sounds like an idea that, after entering the human brain,
floats around for a bit, before being directed “back”: either out of the mind
or, perhaps, down one’s “back,” evoking imagery of chills down a spine.
From there, Powers launches into the first proper song on
the album, “Mute,” with a much fuller sound than anything on his debut album
including, most notably, the use of an actual drum-kit. He begins the album
with a vague line about “living in a 3D world,” further supporting that the
mission here will be to evaluate the same. As the song builds and adds
instruments and effects and complications, Powers makes reference to “roses”
and “corpses” before repeating: “I’ve never seen them.” He then makes
references to “stories” he’s been told before repeating: “I never listened.”
The idea seems to be that we often go through life without
really “looking” or “listening” to the things in it, probably because we are
usually so busy “talking.” The title of the song, “Mute,” might refer then to
the benefits of exercising one’s other senses at the cost of speech. In the
classic Twilight Zone episode, also
called “Mute,” a little girl named Ilse is raised without being taught how to verbally
communicate. This causes Ilse’s other senses to become enhanced, including a
latent telepathic ability that had supposedly become repressed in humans because
of their development of, and over-dependence on, speech. “Mute” suggests that
perhaps humans have been robbing themselves of greater understanding of their
world by talking so much and failing to pay attention.
This sentiment sets the tone for the examination of the
physical and spiritual that occurs throughout the rest of the album. On “The
Bath,” Powers sings “to watch is not to see” and on “Third Dystopia” he speaks
of “pretending to see over the cliff,” seemingly trying to pinpoint an ethereal
quality that can’t quite be identified. On “Raspberry Cane” “everybody cares”
and “everybody’s wanting to see,” where, in all of these songs, “seeing”
appears to be shorthand for “understanding” some larger truth about the
wondrous bughouse we’re all living in.
On slightly heavier numbers like “Pelican Man,” Powers sings
“it’s not true, it’s all in your head” and references “demons” in your bed,
which appears to foreshadow an idea that he visits in more depth on “Sleep
Paralysis.” Sleep Paralysis, in case you are blissfully unaware, is a sleep
phenomenon that causes people to, literally, become momentarily paralyzed while
they hallucinate that someone or something is in the room with them trying to
do them harm. (Having experienced it on a few occasions I can assure you, it’s as
fucking terrifying as it sounds.)
Appropriately, the song “Sleep Paralysis” starts with what
sounds like a peaceful, 50’s lullaby where Powers sings “through the house,
walking fast, stranger tell me, I don’t really see what I am seeing now” before
the narrator evidently falls asleep and the music changes to something
approximating the pop-menace of “Heroes and Villains.” Powers takes the trip
into the hallucinatory realm of half-dream/half-reality, singing, “shepherd,
I’ve been lost too many times to be free,” before seemingly waking up once
again to the sound of the peaceful lullaby. All of this seems to be some
recognition of the power of the mind and perception and how impossible it must
be to make sense of the world around us when our brains are sometimes
barely even capable of making sense of our own bedrooms.
The album’s centerpiece and lead single, “Dropla,” is one of
the only songs on the album that takes a break from being overwhelmed by
the enormity of life and seemingly attempts to fight back against it.
Throughout the song (which is the most direct tribute on the album to the
clean, watery, metallic notes of his prior album) Powers repeats the phrase
“you’ll never die” over and over again with the stubborn insistence of someone
in denial. Of course, the phrase, taken literally, can’t be true. At around
2:45 in the song though, (intensity increasing) Powers sings what sounds like:
“you weren’t there, when I needed, you were lost, you pulled me under” before
immediately going back to repeating: “you’ll never die,” again and again and again.
After the bridge, it almost seems as if Powers is speaking
to someone who is actually already
dead, re-casting his statement of “you’ll never die” as not just adamant denial
but a fervent self-determination that there’s something bigger than “life,”
making us all immortal, that he just can’t see yet.
The influence of producer, Ben H. Allen, (responsible for recent Animal Collective and Deerhunter albums) is most apparent
on the two “waltz” numbers on the album, “Attic Doctor” and “Daisyphobia.” The
haunted-forest carnival-music of “Attic Doctor” seems as if it could be a Centipede Hz B-side and it sets the tone
early for the esoteric mystery that pervades the rest of the album. It’s on the
closing track, “Daisyphobia,” however, where Powers most effectively uses 3/4-time
to represent the themes of Wondrous Bughouse.
The interesting thing about music in 3/4-time is that
because it has become nearly inseparable from the waltz, one can practically “see”
music in that time signature “spinning” in circles. It conjures images of
ballerinas in music boxes, records on turntables, resolving melodies,
infinitely looping sounds. “Daisyphobia” “spins” in this way, over and over,
like children getting dizzy, like the cyclical nature of life, like our world,
the bughouse, rotating and revolving and then fading away into nothingness.
So why would anyone have a “fear of daisies?” Well if you
use daisy petals as a means of prognostication (“he loves me, he doesn’t,” etc.)
you could be afraid of facing the finality of your fate once you’ve pulled the
last petal. Bringing that to the macro-level (and the seminal political
attack ad level), you could also be afraid that after all of our spinning and
questioning and wonderment, we might just be destined to become the authors of
our bughouse’s own demise.
