A few days ago, Trevor Powers aka Youth Lagoon shared another song from his upcoming album ‘Savage Hills Ballroom’, set to be released on September 25th via Fat Possum. After ‘The Knower’, here is ‘Rotten Human’, a rather introspective and moving track, with a very self-deprecating title. Using his very frail high-pitched voice, Powers surrounds himself with a symphonic and dramatic music, part atmospheric keyboard, part trip hop electronic, while delicately adding one layer of sound after another one, making the song culminate in an explosive moment, as if he was too overwhelmed by emotion.
Trevor Powers has a real talent to bring his listeners very close to his personal thoughts and feelings, and this time he sounds more pessimistic than ever, revealing a world of confusion, ‘How are we supposed to know what’s real?/The dirt, the bread, the snow, the rusty steel’, a world of paranoia, ‘They’ll stay indoors until the break of light/The clones, they’ve always said to stay in line’, bringing anger, ‘But I’d rather die than piss away my time’, then despair and resignation, ’Our food’s diseased by altered seeds and dies/So we take a pill and trust the doctor’s lie’… all this is packed in a few lines, a very dense and doomed verse, but the most poignant part arrives right in the middle of this sad and emotional number, when Powers sings ‘Human, I am a rotten human’. From a pessimistic rumination about today’s human society, Powers soon turns the dialogue inside. He had this to say to the Nerdist about the song:
‘Throughout the process of writing this album—about two years—I’ve gone on this spiritual journey to learn more about myself and my faults and all this stuff that I’ve tended ignore for a really long time. It’s so much easier to go through each day and forget the previous day or forget the hurtful things you said to someone or whatever it might be, just the shitty parts of your life. This song is addressing that. It’s really examining what it is that makes me who I am, and what parts of that are disgusting.’
Disgusting? We all have our flaws, but isn’t Trevor a bit harsh on himself? There is absolutely nothing rotten in this surprisingly beautiful track: