Present day music, and for that matter, art in general, seems obsessed with capturing that inexpressible quality found in the days of our youth.  You can almost hear the songs I am referencing, streaming out in a steady flow of bouncy synths and percussive undulations.  M83’s “Midnight City” comes to mind.  The best pop song of this year sounded like a desperate/elated plea for more of whatever it is we only feel for a short period of our lives.  Freedom?  Connection to others?  Utter confusion?  Perhaps an amalgamation of all the above, but perhaps it is truly the idea that deep down, mortality and aging are omnipresent and forever intwined with the freedom of youth, perpetually standing by at the doorstep, crouching down behind the precipice of downward decline, and encroaching upon everyday happiness.  In a generation obsessed with nothing in particular, our artists have become obsessed with the notion of exuding the most powerful emotions they can.  In an age where art first seemed to coincide with minimilism, we now watch The Tree of Life in theaters and hear My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in parked cars.  No one captured this strained, bombastically quiet approach to art, in a more streamlined and elegant manner in 2011 than Youth Lagoon, releasing the album of the year with The Year of Hibernation.  

Quiet songs turn into 4/4 stomps and youth belies the heaviness of old age, the music relying on the same set of dynamics that juxtaposes new and old, life and death.  A lonely kid sitting in his room in Idaho made a set of songs that speak to the questions that peer into our souls and stomp our insane dreams and pressuring anxieties, an album that reacts to the nihilism of the 2000s and the penchant for desiring nothing but an afternoon in bed with your best friends (an array of Apple products, endlessly denying personal reflection and continuously inviting individual regression).  Each time a song builds and builds, the listener knows that they are meant to miss someone they loved, regret a decision they have made, and accept it all as part of one big, messy, and audacious journey.  Much has been ”made of the line don’t stop imagining, the day that you do is the day that you die.”  For good reason, this is the line that accentuates the overreaching emphasis that forms the center of the work - the desire to create and create big in a world that consistently pressures one to think smaller and smaller, less and less, and as simply as possible.  There was time in all of our lives where big was not only commonplace but necessary and essential.  There was a moment in past generations (and there will be a moment in ours) when it became necessary and essential to think big and continue to imagine and Youth Lagoon offered up a pinpoint imagining of what that moment will come to sound like.