Loud Cities Magazine _Issue 3_03_2021

10
Loud Cities Magazine / #3 MAR 2021
REVIEW Mike D.
THE UNDERGROUND YOUTH’s
most Sincere and
Introspective album
Manchester-born, Berlin-based The
Undeground Youth led by Craig Dyer
released their new, most sincere and
introspective tenth album “The Falling”
via Fuzz Club Records on March 12.
The new album is a shadowy folknoir
masterpiece with 8 songs where
Dyer wrote ‘stories’ for ‘retrieval’ and
‘regain’. He handled the vocals, guitars,
piano, harmonica, accordion, and
percussion, while with him are Leonard
Kaage (guitars, slide guitar, drums,
string arrangements, piano, organ,
synth, typewriter, percussion), Olya
Dyer (drums, güiro), Max James
(bass), Astrid Porzig (violin), Magnus
Westergaard (additional vocals and
guitar). The whole sounding in “The
“The Falling”
Falling” is at times majestic but mainly
romantic and introverted, but also quite
social and ambitious. The band plays
with huge skills the pretty finite and
globally adored music style of indiefolk,
and with a bent to jeopardy I’d add;
on the nicely hidden rails of post-punk
when tried by a mostly acoustic team,
and it is all a glory.
“Lyrically this album finds me at my
most honest and autobiographical. I still
shroud the reality of what I have written
within something of a fictional setting,
but the honesty and the romance that
shines throughout the record is more
sincere than it has been in my previous
work. The idea was to strip back the
band to allow for lyrical breathing space”
says Dyer.
Do not expect to hear any old-school
post-punk in there but the same
‘dangers’ that are in your most iconic
and monumental post-punk albums for
life. There is a sweet bitterness all over
in the album, there is veiled hope and
something stranger than that; I felt this
is the music score of an ongoing dream
may be or of a reverie. I felt things in
here are so vaguely clear.