For those of you that haven’t picked up on Leeds’s band Restless Youth, this is what they do. They make wonderfully played Pop tinged NuSoul heavy on the Jazz combined with great female vocals and what I’m going to call spoken word or possibly talking vocals. However they are, they certainly aren’t rap. Or to put it another way, they definitely do talk like that. This, of course, is merely the bare bones, there is more but I’ll get to that.
‘The Everyday Kind’ tells the story of the beginning of a relationship; the male talking vocals one side, the female vocal the other. The music leans heavily jazz-wise, fabulously. But it’s the words that compel. The story, the feelings they describe are ones we can all relate to, this is real life. And there are these wonderful moments of quiet humour in the words.
And now for something that I find difficult to describe, ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ combines jazzy NuSoul with Scottish folk music (Yes, you read that right). And it’s devastatingly beautiful. Particularly lovely is a fantastic violin break. Boy, oh boy.
And then suddenly there is the free-wheeling freeform of ‘I Forgive Us All Bro’. This is heart-wrenching. It’s about the difficult transition from boyhood to manhood, the pain of a mother with cancer and the difficulty of communicating at that age, the pressure to be ‘an adult’ and, most importantly, the regret.
The EP closes with ‘The Day The School Burned Down’.Somehow this isn’t quite as funny as the sirens in the intro might suggest, in fact it’s rather dark. I think this is one of those songs where we all might hear different stories being told. It, and I won’t go into why, resonates very strongly with me. Suffice to say that part of my old school indeed burn down after I’d left, and I wasn’t very sorry to hear it.
Restless Youth are one of those bands whose releases have been consistently wonderful. This, their debut EP, is a step up. The writing and the playing is at a different level of fabulous. The songs are both universal – all of us can relate to something in them – and personal – the stories they tell seem to come from real lived experience; and that is the reason they are so compelling. This is a truly beautiful thing.
Stream/Download https://songwhip.com/restless-youth/no-one-talks-like-that
