Writing PR emails to solicit reviews must be a tricky art, striking a balance between a variety of factors like wanting to appear professional but not hopelessly businesslike; personal enough to make a connection with the prospective reviewer but not so falsely chummy as to put them off; and so on. Or you could just open an email with 18-pt all-caps text saying I BET YOU WON’T CARE. I’m not sure how much success it’s had as an opening gambit, and to be honest I thought it was pretty annoying until I actually listened to Young Adult’s debut DIY album Black Hole. Fortunately, the music is much better than I expected after the forced-disinterest hipster garage vibe I got from that email.
So, a brief bit of bio: the band hail from the town of Allston in Massachusetts and formed relatively recently, in October ’09, with a demo following a few months later. They played with fairly well-known names like Wavves, Male Bonding and Iron Chic before heading off to record this record. I figure some or all of the band’s members have other projects in their back catalogues but I’ve no idea what they are (lie: I just googled up an interview and the names Magic Magic and Whitetail are mentioned; apparently various band members jammed together prior to the band forming, so yeah).
Black Hole has a universally big sound that I really want to describe as ‘epic’, even though I’m sad to hop on a bandwagon of abusing words’ original meanings. So, instead I’ll say that there are these cavernous, pounding drums, with a huge fuzzy guitar sound that reminds me a lot of Torche with less stoner metal riffs, more garage punk, and an equal amount of groove. There’s some subtle delay on the lead guitar that complements the dirty low-end noise nicely; honestly, I want the pedals these guys are playing through.
My favourite tunes on offer are ‘Impression’, with its stomping killer riff and hooky lead, and ‘Annulation’ which is an indicatively immense song with relentless pace. But honestly, after almost a dozen listens I don’t think there’s a duff entry among the thirteen songs present. If you like it fuzzy, fast and loud, check these guys out.