Richard Youngs - Belief

The Quietus

Richard Youngs is a singular musician, for whom the description ‘unclassifiable’ comes in very handy. He has released an impossible number of albums over the last 25 years, and his collaboration list is a pocket guide to a persistent, shamanic strain of alternative British music. In the past he has been claimed for free folk and improv, and the press release for this latest album, Belief, cheerfully quotes The Wire’s tongue-in-cheek attempt to pin him down as “the post-punk autodidact’s post-punk autodidact”. Put simply, he does what he pleases, and he knows what he’s doing. On Belief, this takes the form of an album masquerading as a conceptual art prank. However, despite conjuring a fog of distraction around these eleven new tracks Youngs is, as always, unable to hide his unerring talent for writing great tunes.

Like most conceptual art, Belief becomes something entirely different when you read the accompanying text. Apparently, Youngs recorded Belief as a 21st-century bedroom album, playing all the instruments, sampling all the samples, and constructing beats which he then “played back at randomly determined tempos in durations mapped to randomly chosen major label songs”. There’s no way to know which randomly chosen songs may lie beneath the ones we can actually hear, but as a sort of songwriting divination the concept is both tantalising and funny. Youngs claims he intended Belief as an art project, planning to send it to major labels hoping to collect rejection letters. Instead, Tim Burgess heard the defining ‘gnostic pop’ he was seeking for his new record label, O Genesis.

This would be a good backstory for any album, whether taken literally or not, but Belief is much more - a set of songs that are distinctive and alluring, and amount to something special. This is a work of transcendent melancholy, where Youngs lays his insecurities out for inspection, transformed into the most gorgeous under-the-counter pop. The box of discarded samples he raided for his bedroom beats included tape hiss, extractor fan noise and a very 80s drum machine. On the opening track, ‘My Own 21st Century’, they roll across the frequencies like a jet plane crashing to earth. Youngs’ tense treble reverberates as he sings “Do you play requests / to alleviate my misery?”; he sounds like David Bowie reborn, an industrial cousin to ‘Where Are We Now?’

The entire album is in a minor key, and tracks with titles including ‘Nebulosity’, ‘Bewilderment’ and ‘In Another Fog’ send a clear message. ‘Nebulosity’ is a glitch-ridden lament of great beauty, backing vocals crooning with a delicious intensity. ‘Bewilderment’ sounds like Bowie too, this time ‘Five Years’, played with a detuned acoustic guitar and perhaps some kind of clicking, mechanical toy. It is a personal song, where Youngs seems to reach out for connections to collective experience of dislocation. However, although he mines a seam of deep melancholy, Youngs is too clever to give listeners only what they expect. ‘Can You Not See My Intensity?’ has a squealing grunge guitar breaking over a thicket of interference. ‘Feeling Like Dystopia’ has a melody delivered via reversed samples that are both unidentifiable and lovely. The final track, ‘Great Breath of Wonderment’, combines a deadpan vocal, a chiming guitar figure, and a beat like the rustling of beetles crossing dead leaves. It is a fitting conclusion to an album that conjures musical ghosts to create an inspired, junk shop, song cycle for the times. Richard Youngs is a consummate inventor, a musician with the constant ability to write new songs that seem familiar from moment their strange samples kick in. Belief is an album for repeated listening, offering consolation, delight and reward in generous portions.

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It’s worth saying, at this juncture, that Youngs’ forays into new musical territory often bear only the faintest resemblance to these provinces as they are imagined by others. 2014’s Primary Concrete Attack, for example, arose out of an almost contrary desire – on the part of someone who doesn’t like reggae – to make a dub record. From what I remember, it sounded a bit like an Ekoplekz record falling down a flight of stairs in slow motion (in other words, brilliant). Surprisingly, the one time in recent memory in which a Youngs record came as close as could be to being as billed was in 2009 when the inspired Beyond the Valley of the Ultrahits arrived as Youngs’ diversion into 'proper pop'. It was such a roaring success that Jagjaguwar picked it up, after its initial release as a CD-R, and thank goodness they did. It would be criminal if a record so densely packed with effortlessly great tunes had been lost to Discogs like so much of his (limited run) discography.

Belief is something of a sequel to Beyond the Valley of Ultrahits. That being so, it’s almost the polar opposite of Youngs’ last record: the late 2017 double album, This is Not a Lament, which was nearly two hours long and veered wildly between melody and dissonance. Belief, in contrast, is a trim thirty-three minutes in length and – whilst the techniques used to get there are often somewhat esoteric – it’s Youngs’ most accessible collection of songs released this decade. That’s not to say that Belief is a 'pop' record, per se, but it’s definitely on that part of the spectrum.

‘My Own 21st Century’ kicks things off like Robert Wyatt taking on Berlin-era Bowie. Minimalism, perhaps the defining feature of Youngs’ musical career, is the order of the day here. Cutting synths, mournful bass, distant hints of guitar, and Youngs’ vocals are all that is required. Given that the record was reportedly recorded in Youngs’ bedroom, with the man himself responsible for all instrumentation, this might not be surprising, but the vaguely widescreen results certainly are. For a record originally conceived as providing the basis for a mail art project, in which Youngs would send Belief to major labels and collect the rejection letters, this album has a scale to it that occasionally transcends the intimacy one may associate with much of Youngs’ back catalogue. Perhaps no universe exists in which the beautiful ‘Nebulosity’ or ‘Caledonia Running Out of My Mind’ would be guaranteed Radio 1 hits, but neither would sound out of place on, say, afternoon 6 Music either.

Belief isn’t likely to catapult this unassuming artist into the mainstream. “Do you have a channel to channel my epiphany?” Youngs asks on the opening track. Hopefully, thanks to Belief appearing via Tim Burgess’ excellent O’ Genesis label, at least some lucky new pairs of ears will now have the opportunity to find out. Much as I’d like to jealously protect the 11 glorious tracks here and keep them to myself, it really wouldn’t be very fair.