All at Once

We Say...

Review by J. Edward Keyes

The clouds hang heavy over the third full-length from Young People. A haunting, overcast record full of ghosts and gravestones, All At Once finds the bi-coastal trio moving past the haphazard guitar stabs that characterized their early outings into something darker and more dramatic. Mixing free jazz with funeral hymns, the group crafts tiny, icy canticles loaded with power and portent, like Patty Waters channeling Nostradamus.

The songs are more space than sound. You can almost hear the air rushing between the notes, cold wind blowing through bare bars of piano and skeletal guitars. All At Once is ghost-town music, and there's an emptiness at the center of the songs that's distinctly unsettling. The closest comparison is the Werner Herzog movie Heart of Glass, where the actors were reportedly hypnotized before the camera started rolling; there's a similarly zombie-like quality to the group's maneuvering, and it casts a frightening spell.

The record's weird power lies in the way Katie Eastburn sings. Her voice has gained a new depth and resonance since 2003's War Prayers, and she's learned how to stretch out notes until they become shapeless and spectral. She fiddles with cadence as well, breaking up the syllables in "Slow Moving Storm" so the words sound alien. Her low alto is ominous and hard to shake, and All at Once’s brittle songs are wholly dependent upon her cold blue core. Lyrics have been pared down to a patchwork of odd images and strange omens, well-suited to Eastburn's Weird Sister wailing. "Take your time walking down/And you'll get plenty of moss," she warns on "R&R," and though the advice is more than a little shopworn, Eastburn's grim delivery makes it sound less like an adage and more like an incantation.

The album's summary statement is "Your Grave," a foggy elegy that arrives near the record's midpoint. Over pinpricks of guitar and a bass drum that flutters like an arrhythmia, Eastburn spells out a bleak, Dickinsonian vision of decay and despair. It proceeds slowly and deliberately, following a strange dream logic to its final flurry of chords. There's no revelation and no epiphany, just resignation — it may not be redemptive, but damned if it isn't captivating.