Can you be more preoccupied by death than this new Trevor Powers' song? Powers, aka Youth Lagoon, must be repeating a hundred times ‘you’ll never die, you’ll never die, you’ll never die’, transforming the line into the central mantra of ‘Dropla’, the mysterious title of the tune,… which has probably nothing to do with the Bulgarian province?
The 6-minute luminous opus, about the wishful idea of never dying, circles about the obsessive line with cute toy keyboard, underwater synth and warm arabesques of sound collages. But it sounds even more grandiose than the previous bedroom-pop from Youth Lagoon's 2011 album ‘The Year of Hibernation’. The song floats like a melancholic dream between your ears, building up pure emotion to the point you want to believe everything Powers sings.
I saw him once at Origami Vinyl, and I was so impressed by his melancholic soundscapes and maturity despite the fact he looked like a shy high school kid, … after all this is someone who declared when he was barely 22:
‘My mental state is usually pretty sporadic… a lot of this record was influenced by a fear of mortality but embracing it at the same time. Realizing that human life is only great because it is temporary. Experimenting with ideas about dimensions. I’m not a gifted speaker, so explaining things is difficult for me. But music always makes sense.’
Dropla is the first song off Youth Lagoon's upcoming LP, ‘Wondrous Bughouse’, out March 5 via Fat Possum, and you can even download it below, whether you believe in an afterlife or not.