The Like Young, Last Secrets

reviewed by dave heaton

"The Hell With This Whole Affair," the opening song is titled. Yet the music is not a bitter kiss-off but a melancholy, pretty, piano-led instrumental. Don't worry, there's plenty of anger in store.

The Like Young's first two albums, Art Contest and So Serious, took the melodic pop-rock that Joe and Amanda Ziemba played with their previous band Wolfie and stripped it down to a rawer form. In the process they turned the guitars up, pushed the drums faster, and made their songs more aggressive. So Serious seemed especially propelled by a bitter rejection of greed and power games. Motivated in part by thankless, day-job drudgery in a corporate environment, the songs were marked by outrage, with Amanda's sweet, gentler harmony vocals serving as the reassuring voice to sooth the anguish in Joe's singing and guitar-playing.

Last Secrets comes from a similar place. It's often loud, fast, and driven by a rejection of greed, repression, and selfishness. An enduring theme is the culture of money, the way it corrupts and the way we all become unfortunately dependent on it. The punchy first single "For Money or Love" and "Cold, Cold", the song that follows it on the album, each encapsulate the struggle we feel between the money we need to get by and the life we really want to live. "All the Wrong Reasons" takes a well-deserved jab at men using their social status to try and get women to sleep with them. The album as a whole is a heartfelt expression of the pain of life, the cuts we all get day by day and how we deal with them.

Lyrically it's an even more articulate expression of the themes of previous albums. And musically it's the same. While the previous Like Young albums still had a clear musical relationship to Wolfie's straightforward power-pop, here the songs often take the road less traveled. They're not as musically straightforward, they're much more dynamic, much more likely to change before your ears. The duo is working with silence as much as loudness, with velocity but also the ways slowing down can drive the feeling home even clearer sometimes. They've got some of the catchiest hooks they've ever written. Yet they're not using them as empty sing-along-and-discard choruses, they're blending them deeper into the framework of these tough, rapturous songs.

It's both the loudest, angriest Like Young album and the most diverse, the most complicated. Gentle moments give way to loud explosions of pain. A drive-fast, scream-to-the-rafters approach lives right there with sadness expressed through a gentler tone; listen to "Obviously Desperate" for a great example. Amanda's voice is used even more perfectly than in the past as a softer complement to Joe's. Wonderfully pop melodies are integrated into hard-edged, kick-ass rock n' roll in a smooth, rewarding way.

The Like Young was born with an emphasis on simplicity. What's so stunning about Last Secrets is the way they've stayed true to that ethos while making rock music that's so beautifully complex. It's not just their richest album, it's one of the only rock albums in recent times to feel so raw yet also be so filled with layers of feeling. It feels born of the darkest anger and hurt, yet it's a work of beauty.

{www.polyvinylrecords.com, www.thelikeyoung.com}