Video: Youth Lagoon's "Mute"

Listen, I rarely recommend some hazy, over-saturated indie rock played by a Crayola-hair-colored, geometric-patterned-vinyl-jacket-wearing, wide-eyed goon drinking a glass of red kool-aid to wash away his reverb and irony soaked introspection, but I think there's something special here. Something magical. Trevor Powers of Youth Lagoon might even be a wizard.

Just wait for the elevating chorus. He sets it up perfectly. There is both anticipation and nostalgia in his heavily-delayed vocals and warbling synth pads, and once he realizes you've had enough of his repetition and slight retrospection, the song morphs into a melody soaring on the backs of eagles, and crescendos into layers of laser guns and drawn out guitar.

Youth Lagoon's single "Mute" is from their sophomore album Wondrous Bughouse released March 5th on Mississippi label Fat Possum. "Mute" really came as a surprise—textural, orchestral, and mainly instrumental. Trevor Powers is obviously doing something right; he'll be opening for fellow melodramatic rockers The National on June 5th at Barclays Arena in Brooklyn, New York. Powers says the songs on his record deal with the realm where the "spiritual meets the physical." With "Mute", Powers recreates the out of body experience in a context of PBS-tinged environmental educational video keyboards and one amazingly transcendent vocal line.

You can buy the vinyl, CD, mp3, or cassette for Wondrous Bughouse from Fat Possum's website.

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