I feel like I’ve featured Young Husband on ANBAD before.
They haven’t appeared here – I checked – but all the same, there’s a curious feeling of déjà vu about this band. Wait, haven’t I written that before, too?
Tortuous attempts at post-modernism aside, when a band trigger small gulps of anxiety via an inability to remember whether a song is an old forgotten favourite or not, it’s usually a good sign.
This not unpleasant feeling of clawing wildly at a previously-trusted reality was triggered by Young Husband‘s Nothing, Nothing, a drowsy slacker paean to hopeless love which shares all the primary characteristics with a gentle slide into a hot bubble bath.
Heady, hot, and immensely comforting, Nothing, Nothing is, if nothing else, devastatingly simple in its execution: a song that seems to consist of everything and nothing, noise without sonic overload, melody without the strings of notes.
Perhaps this is the song’s – and the band’s – strength. This isn’t jack-of-all-trade-ism, or a fluke: here’s a song constructed to appeal to all our lingering doubts, innate responses to fluffy sonic caresses and default quizzical nature.
Contrary, dense and blustry, Young Hunsband are an enigma wrapped within thunderously soft sounds. Maybe you’ve heard them before.