Youth Pictures of Florence Henderson, Youth Pictures of Florence Henderson

Youth Pictures of Florence Henderson, Youth Pictures of Florence Henderson [How Is Annie]

By: Chris Polley

Sometimes I get sick of the bumps and monotony of the ride on the indie bandwagon. It’s a lot of fun for the first few miles, but when those potholes and long stretches of prairie start repeating themselves, I’ve just gotta tell the driver to pull over so I can jump off for a bit. And when I do so, I usually end up wandering aimlessly in the comfortable acres of forest where I was raised. To cut through this sloppy metaphor, there are days and nights when after scouring all the music blogs and aggregators that I just want to listen to something that sounds like the music I listened to in high school.

And while I have been distinctly removed from the realm of teenagedom for quite some years now, it’s not often I’m reminded of it in such a heavy way as I was when, for instance, I first listened to the sophomore effort from Norway’s Youth Pictures of Florence Henderson. And it’s very possible that the only reason it affected me so deeply with this particular record is because that high school recollection flooded through my headphones because of one singular aspect of the band’s sound (I hadn’t heard their debut before taking in the new one): emo singing.

Now it took a lot of cringing and a big airy sigh before I was able to type those two words. The e-word is not really a can of worms I’d like to get into right now (nor would, I think, anyone post-2006), but let’s just keep it at this – the vocals are wussy and yearning. This is notable aside from the rest of the band’s very rich instrumentation because of the way I’ve discovered my musical taste has evolved (or, rather unfortunately, stagnated) since that anti-climactic graduation day. It’s sickeningly simple, actually: take out the emo singing and you’ve got a post-rock band. Actually, many may still claim that YPOFH is a post-rock band. This, in my humble opinion, is false. They are a post-rock band with emo singing, thus making them an emo band. Believe me, I wish I could just label them post-rock and call it a day, feeling like it’s another band in my wheelhouse, just with vocals instead of letting the majestic strings and reverb-laden guitar leads rue the day.

But the truth remains painfully clear that once you add emo singing to any subgenre of music, it becomes, for all intents and purposes, emo as fuck. The human voice has that oh-so-tricky quality to it that when it’s placed on the top of the mix, even if hazy and slightly clouded by layers upon layers of sparkling arpeggios, the singing style is going to determine how it fits into the indie zeitgeist. And almost always, when it’s emo singing, it’s going to fall just outside the accepted arena of said zeitgeist. It’s just the way it is: Fall Out Boy, Plain White T’s, All-American Rejects, and a handful of others that do not need to be mentioned have claimed their spot in the Top 40 mainstream music scene, and thus even the slightest resemblance to any of these acts (or, more importantly, their predecessors) will call for immediate abolishment from the kingdom of indie.

In many ways this is sad, because this self-titled record from a quartet of mild-mannered Scandinavians is so fluidly constructed, each track built with what must have been hours upon hours of grueling composition and practice, does not deserve to be pushed aside just because their singer enjoys alternating between softly cooing like a semi-eunuch and emoting like a brokenhearted adolescent. And even as someone who has an inappropriately large soft spot for any band that consciously forces its guitarists to pick for eight minutes instead of strum for three, I can say that while it would still work as an instrumental album, it definitely is much more vivid and ornate because of the addition of emo singing. Obviously the two styles match in many ways, it’s just that since the diverging between bands like Mineral and bands like Boys Like Girls, there has been little to no reason to combine the two (unless you’re one of the few stubborn holdovers from the previous generation, like the unrelenting and eternally awesome The Appleseed Cast) unless you tweak down the emo just a bit to make way for angst and/or lite-rock cross-over appeal (Death Cab for Cutie) or tweak down the indie sensibilities in favor of a crushed-out mechanical backing band and mindless “heartfelt” lyrics (Owl City).

Luckily for me I’ve been obsessing over three different kinds of music since high school that have, together, formed a trifecta of sorts that allows me to unabashedly love this new record by YPOFH: 1) my old catalog of emo records, in which there might not be xylophones or violins, but there’s a whole lot of cymbal crown hits and aching guitars, 2) the small new catalog of toned-down emo/indie hybrids, that may include more electro beats or acoustic guitars, but still clearly can’t stop singing about girls and sunsets and the usual tripe that inspires dramatic singing, and 3) the immensely large catalog of post-rock bands trying their variation on the Mogwai/Godspeed thing, trying to prove every day that you don’t need a singer to be emo but without one you don’t have to be labeled with that dirty word.

Because Youth Pictures of Florence Henderson obviously have no interest in the game of genre politics, they can be unapologetically emo without even thinking they’d ever be accused of having to apologize for anything so arbitrary or silly. The record is stuffed with the most satisfyingly sprawling songs I’ve heard throughout my obsession with all three types of catalogs, and while it never is catchy enough to be considered pop music, nor is it concerned enough with the current trends of indie to even be part of that spectrum, the band does wear its influences on its sleeve. This is something that is ever increasingly hard to do for any band that wants to get noticed, because it’s usually so easy to call any young band out for mimicking, especially when what they’re mimicking is not even hip. But the men of YPOFH do it with such grace and efficacy that you can tell that they really truly do not care one iota about preconceptions, trying to make it, or trying to be different. They only care about what really matters most when listening to music: beauty and feeling.

Rating: 98%

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One-Month Difference: 92% (↓ 6%). Yes, it was kinda too good to be true. It’s still an objectively gorgeous record, full of lush textures and climactic melodies, but after a month of listening, the songs haven’t really differentiated themselves liked I hoped they would, making all the beauty seem a little samey from track to track. Luckily that’s not that big of a deal, because even though the songs are so sprawling that one can’t latch onto any particular one more than the other, it’s still an incredibly rewarding long-playing listen, and I won’t be getting sick of it anytime soon.