YOUTH MOVIE SOUNDTRACKS
A decidedly rum bunch of demos this month, so it falls to a bunch of youngsters from just beyond the confines of Oxfordshire - Wonderful Wycombe to be precise - to show how it maybe should be done. YMS have been making inroads into the local scene lately and arrive here from the academy of post-rock that worships at the temples of Shellac and Slint while casting an ear back to the old gods, The Cocteau Twins. So we get stop-start bursts of aggressive hardcore dynamics mixed with floaty, spangled drifting. Sometimes they top things off with mildly distracted vocals - a bit like local contemporaries The Workhouse used to do before they went completely instrumental - and they hold an atmosphere well, rumbling and grumbling like distant thunder that never quite arrives. And we guess that’s where they need a bit of work - moving things on once they’ve used up an idea - sometimes you’re itching for it all to explode or even head off spaceward instead of ploughing an even deeper furrow in the ground. While it’s a bit post-rock by numbers at times then, they do have some cool ideas, touching on everything from Minor Threat to Rothko depending on their mood and even stretching one number over nine minutes without descending into tedium.