Youth of America

Orpheus Listening Challenge 2024: #49 A punk album from the 1980s (3rd album)

Youth of America is one of those albums I should've listened to earlier, but it's better late than never.

Taking Too Long has a krautrock motorik with a-esque psychedelic tonality in its instrumentals and the vocals by Sage, Can This Be is the only true punk number here, and Pushing The Extreme combs through noise rock and filters it through a punk sieve.

The second half, though, is where things get a bit more interesting. When It's Over is an uncommon, 6-minute, almost entirely instrumental blazer of a song with a beautiful noisy guitar solo that transcends those garage rock influences, No Fair is almost a predecessor of goth-rock with its darker undertone. The trademark noisy guitars also do a whole lot to pump up my enjoyment of this one.

But the track that gets the most praise is the closer, Youth Of America, and I can definitely see why. It's a unique take on punk: taking the thing which made it unique, that being the quick nature of it (which is the basis of punk, if we're being frank) and substituting it with a jam that sounds like being. The apocalyptic instrumental, which sounds a lot like fray wires shooting out electricity mixed with a lot of post-nuclear radio static and the screams of the damned, in duet with a potent lyric power which resonates a lot even today, makes for an amazing song. Nauseating in the best way possible.

The entire album is on an upswing motion, with it being front-loaded with songs that are, not necessarily duds, but are not a lot different from what other punk bands were doing, but it really picks up the pace later on with the final three tracks, all of which are trailblazers of different styles, ranging from noise rock to gothic-style post-punk.

It's really a shame that the opening to it is disappointing, because the ending is astonishingly good.