Powers Stumbles Trying to Break Out of the Bughouse

Though Trevor Powers, the man behind Youth Lagoon, is just releasing his sophomore album, his musical aesthetic already seems to be set in stone. “Wondrous Bughouse” continues Powers’ traditional atmospheric sound, which he creates with bright, sometimes ethereal synths and understated vocals. There are places, however, where “Wondrous Bughouse” breaks away from the strategy set by Youth Lagoon’s debut, “The Year of Hibernation.” It more readily embraces dissonance and distortion, which make it an album that is not always beholden to the conventions of synth-pop. However, the album does stumble on its more pointed deviations. Ultimately, Powers’ musical experiments within the context of his established sound allow him to produce an album that, if nothing else, delivers a unique but unrefined experience filled with ambient whimsy and delightfully confusing innovation.

In his first track, “Through Mind and Back,” Powers forcefully reveals the principle-breaking evolution upon which he continues to draw on throughout the album. The song begins with overt dissonance, and as the purely instrumental track progresses, creaky twangs are layered over a bed of deep reverberations, until the track eventually devolves into what sounds like nothing more than the whirring of machines. Even so, the song is an efficacious introduction to the album, almost serving as a preparatory period for the more experimental tracks to come.

Indeed, Powers builds directly from the oddity of “Through Mind and Back” with the next two tracks in the album, creating an experimental trio of songs. The rather mystifying note choices from “Through Mind and Back” are reflected in the second track, “Mute,” which employs distorted synths to disrupt the otherwise pleasant melody and make complacency all but impossible. This insistence on active listening continues with the next song, “Attic Doctor,” which is in the ever-unexpected triple meter. The effect of these eccentric musical decisions is the creation of a paradoxical sound—these songs feel like ambient noise even as they refuse to fade into the background.

Though Powers never completely reverts to compositions akin to those of “The Year of Hibernation,” the album does become less dissonant and more charismatic as it continues. Powers still hints at discordance and throws in another song in triple meter, “Daisyphobia,” but the peculiarity is limited enough that “Wondrous Bughouse” remains an intersection of curiosity and approachability. The epitome of this interchange is the penultimate track, “Raspberry Cane,” which combines moments of light distortion, an extremely catchy vocal and instrumental melody, and a solid beat that carries the song along for much of its six minutes.

This pop-like catchiness, however, should not be a cue to disregard the album thematically. The sugary synths create a platform for surprisingly existential and oblique lyrics. The songs almost exclusively concern themselves with self-reflexive thinking. In “Mute,” Powers sings, “The devil tries to take my mind / But I can’t quite get inside.” Fittingly, Powers’ verses on this track—which are difficult to decipher auditorily—are almost opaque in their meaning as well. Powers takes this insistence on lyrical and melodic cloudiness too far in “Wondrous Bughouse,” though, to the point that a vast majority of the lyrics are incomprehensible without re-listen after re-listen. In fact, the major flaw of this album is the extremes to which it takes what are fundamentally good ideas. At points in the first track the dissonance becomes excessive and overwhelms the forward momentum, and the triple meter of “Attic Doctor,” particularly the painful emphasis of the first beat, is so strongly pronounced that it becomes nauseating by the end.

It is true that Powers has a great album on his hands. It is also true that it could have benefited from critical revision so that its fantastic concepts could be expressed with more moderation.  Powers took a major step toward releasing his creative potential on “Wondrous Bughouse,” but because of his failure to properly harness his raw, imaginative energy, he has created an album whose inventiveness is compromised by its overstriving.