Young Veins

• HorsePower
  Tweet

Oct 6, 2010

The Means To Being Young

Words by Sean Moeller, Illustration by Johnnie Cluney, Sound engineering by Mike Gentry

The songs of The Young Veins, can be boiled down to one of the lines from the bands song, Young Veins (Die Tonight): Is young a word for dumb, a word for fun/We have the time of our life every night/Like its our job to lose our minds or some appropriate retoolings of that line. Youd need to throw plenty of romantic sentiment into the remix, but that sentiment would also be impossible to distill from a greater urge to apply it to the bones of a clubbing monster a gang of pretty, young men out to sow their wild oats. Ryan Ross and Jon Walker, the Topanga, California, bands co-lead vocalists, learned all about such things as members of Panic! At The Disco before leaving the group due to creative differences in mid-2009, playing in a band that got massive in a hurry and was adored by cute, young women and men from sea to shining sea. For many, it might be hard to let all of that go you know, those spoils going to those victors but for many more, a retreat into a form of songwriting that was less theatrical and conceptual and more pure bloodedly rock n fuckin roll seems like a nice move. So, thats what theyve done with the Young Veins, recruiting Tilly and the Walls keyboardist Nick White, drummer Nick Murray and bassist Andy Soukal, to bring out in themselves the sort of music that swaggers a little, but really just chronicles what it means to be young, thoughtful and without many cares in the world to get hung up about. The songs on the bands debut album, Take A Vacation, are loaded with what seem to be the remains of some crazy nights out in the city, until ungodly hours filled with wine and beer and smelling like smoke and traces of rubbed off and sweaty perfumes as well as those nights when the piecing together of it all and the contemplation of past crazy nights starts to formulate and come together as sound theory. Eerily and wonderfully, both Ross and Walker sound like the undervalued and underrated American songwriter, Brendan Benson, circa his modern-day classic record Lapalco, their voices clear as bells and emitting a cool confidence that seems impervious to rebukes or wrinkles in any aspirations or plans. On the song, Take A Vacation, for which the album takes its title, Ross sings, Our loneliness will keep us warm, however, theres a better sense that this loneliness is something largely unfamiliar for these fellows, except in very extreme or rare cases. The songs on that they wrote for this record burst with fast love and experimental love the kind that likely wont exist once the initial pixie dust wears off days, nights or weeks later and theres a joyous opulence of youthfulness that gets us into odd corners, like the one described in the song, Cape Town, where Ross sings, Asked to be her husband/She already had one, in prison/I saw you/I met you/I loved you.

The Young Veins Official Site

Session Comments

Older Comments