Album Review: Youth Lagoon - Wondrous Bughouse

Since 2011's The Year Of Hibernation, Trevor Powers has broadened his musical and lyrical scope, moving the once bedroom project of Youth Lagoon into the studio (and in the hands of producer Ben H Allen), to create the experimental and majestic Wondrous Bughouse.

Immediately you are greeted with crackly, tinkering audio, on Through Mind And Back, which seamlessly flows into the typically-Youth Lagoon bouncy-pop number, Mute. His experimentation with lengthy instrumental jams has drawn most songs near and past the six-minute mark (Mute, Dropla, Raspberry Cane) and the highly emotive cadences prominent on …Hibernation have returned, swelling as magnificently as they did back in '11, only this time they are beautifully littered with splashes and drones of chopped up sounds.

The album turns a psychedelic corner with Attic Doctor, the fragmented clacking of castanets a sonic representation of his fascination with the “human psyche” and “where the spiritual meets the physical world”, which the 23-year-old said was the driving force behind album number two. Powers has also expressed this via the wonderfully surreal album cover art; an intricate and somewhat child-like drawing of life, nature and symbols – the colourful cousin of Brett Whiteley's Alchemy. The child-like innocence remains in tracks like Dropla; the giddy intro reminiscent of a child's playground, only to later reveal its morbid truths as the song opens up like a diary entry, reliving the story of watching a loved one pass away – chanting in denial, “You'll never die, you'll never die”.

The Idaho-based musician pushes and pulls on your emotions; from blissful sonic waves of hope to the melancholic stories hidden beneath. Wondrous Bughouse is yet another fascinating insight into the elusive mind of Trevor Powers, as each song playfully dances between the dualities of dark and light, mortality and immortality, imagination and reality.