- Deaths is the third album from London punk band Sauna Youth. Their unique, tightly wound style of punk music fuses elements of garage-rock style riffage with a repetitive post-punk rhythmic sensibility littered with bouts of harsh textural experimentalism from all directions. Alternatingly at times reminiscent of Total Control, Wire and This Heat, but ultimately not falling into the same category as any of them.
At the forefront of the record is undeniably the guitar, which almost throughout the whole album drives the direction of the music. It’s also the most dynamic element, shifting between textural noise, straight rock riffs, jagged post-punk, and dirgy metal like riffs of Distracted, while the approach from the rest of the elements remains fairly consistent in the face of these guitar feats. Though at times there is a palpable shift in focus to samples and vocals, or the rhythm section, like the driving bass line and percussion on on Unreal City.
There are the omnipresent unison vocals, which follow concise word forms broken up into small, often no more than two-word lines. Problems is maybe my favourite statement of the album. It’s mostly one-word unison vocal over a fast d-beat rhythm is a great intervention into this somewhat binary form. A single repetitive thought whirling around in a wash of different shades of noise.
There is generally little space in much of Sauna Youth’s music, it’s either on or off, almost always in a state of energetic flux or experimental exhaustion, at full bar the occasional guitar intro or textural sample outro. But emerging from the B-Side of the record is a wider suite of experimentalism, The Patio is almost a garage-pop number reminiscent of recent School Damage, with its floating synth melody over a vicious rhythm, and a subdued and faintly distorted vocal. While the frantic pitch bending synthesizer of In Flux imbues the music with a deeper sense of chaos.
These moments of the unexpected really make Deaths stand out from the crowd, coming to a head with the droning woodwinds and spoken word of Swerve where a meandering monologue unfolds over deep, undulating sampler drones with light touches of percussion. Deceptively straightforward, there are many things that make Sauna Youth stand out from the pack.
- Jaden Gallagher.