Originally posted Dec 20, 2016 12:38PM
Kanine Records – KR591
Friends For Now is a record built out of haze, but the haze is doing real structural work. Young Prisms formed in San Francisco in 2009, and by the time this debut LP appeared on Kanine Records in January 2011 they had already released earlier material through Mexican Summer and Transparent. The ten tracks here make sense as part of that moment when shoegaze, noise pop and psychedelic guitar music were being pulled back into the indie underground without anyone pretending the 1990s had never happened. Young Prisms clearly knew the vocabulary: smeared guitars, buried voices, drones, repetition, bright melody half-hidden inside distortion. What saves Friends For Now from becoming period costume is how physically the band uses those sounds. The guitars are not merely atmospheric curtains. They surge, scrape, brighten, recede and occasionally swallow the rhythm section whole. The bass often becomes the clearest melodic guide while the vocals hover in and out of intelligibility. Contemporary reviews repeatedly heard the album as shoegaze or noise pop, and that is accurate, but the actual files make clear how much movement is hidden inside the blur.
“Friends For Now” is the shortest proper song on Side A, just over two minutes, and it opens the record in a comparatively restrained way. The file is noticeably darker and less bright than most of what follows. Guitar noise hangs over a simple pulse, vocals arrive softened by reverb, and the whole track feels like the record forming itself out of fog. It is a smart opening because Young Prisms do not immediately spend everything. The volume and spectral density increase dramatically on “If You Want To,” where the guitar field gets much brighter and more abrasive and the drums push harder underneath it. At more than four minutes, the song has room to cycle through repetition rather than merely present a hook. The vocals are present enough to register as melody but remain partially submerged, making voice and guitar behave almost like two layers of the same instrument.
“Sugar” is one of the strongest demonstrations of the band’s pop instinct. The uploaded file remains loud and saturated, but the melodic center is clearer than on “If You Want To.” The bass line is especially important because it gives the ear something stable to follow while the guitars keep dissolving around it. The song sounds sweet without becoming clean. That relationship between sweetness and abrasion is probably the key to the whole album. Young Prisms are not using noise to destroy melody. They are using noise to make melody feel farther away, something that has to be reached through interference.
“Eleni” pushes the brightness even further. It has one of the highest spectral centers of the ten uploaded files and a sharper, more active upper register. The drums and guitars feel almost fused into one continuous surface at points, but small changes in attack keep the track moving. The melody seems to drift across that surface rather than sit on top of it. This is where comparisons to classic shoegaze become unavoidable, but Young Prisms have more garage looseness than many of the British bands usually used as reference points. The guitars smear, but they also scrape. The band does not sound precious about texture.
“In Your Room” is the longest piece on the album at nearly six minutes, and it uses that extra space well. Instead of simply extending one loud idea, the track has a broader dynamic arc. Quieter passages allow the rhythm and vocal lines to become more exposed before the distortion closes back around them. The file is also one of the brightest on Side A, so even the quieter sections retain a kind of electrical glare. The title suggests intimacy, but the music makes the room feel enormous, almost impossible to measure. By the end of Side A, Young Prisms have moved from murky introduction through increasingly bright and saturated textures until the record feels fully engulfed.
Side B opens with “All Day Holiday,” which lasts less than a minute and works more like a transition than a conventional song. It is quieter than most of the album and comparatively sparse, creating a brief opening in the wall before “Breathless” arrives. That sequencing matters. After the long expansion of “In Your Room,” the tiny interlude resets the listener’s sense of scale.
“Breathless” is the brightest and most high-frequency-heavy file of the album. The guitars feel especially grainy and compressed, with cymbal and distortion energy crowding the upper register. The title fits the physical sensation of the track. There is very little space to breathe inside the arrangement. Even the vocal seems trapped within the same pressure field as the guitars. The rhythm does not sprint, but the density creates urgency anyway.
“Feel Fine” is nearly five minutes and slightly warmer in tonal balance than “Breathless,” though still loud and saturated. The track has one of the clearest long-form grooves on the record. Guitar layers drift over a steady pulse, and the repetition becomes almost hypnotic. This is one of the album’s strongest examples of Young Prisms understanding that shoegaze does not require constant change. Sometimes the most effective move is to hold a pattern in place long enough for the texture itself to become the event.
“I Don’t Get Much” is more compact and rhythmically direct. It also has a bright upper register, but the song feels less sprawling than “Feel Fine.” The melody comes through more quickly and the arrangement is easier to grasp on first contact. That makes it useful late in the sequence, where the album could easily have begun to blur into one long mass of distortion. Young Prisms keep changing the proportions just enough to stop that from happening.
“Stay Awake” closes the record with a noticeably darker and quieter profile than most of Side B. At more than four and a half minutes, it has time to let the energy fall away gradually rather than ending with another blast. The reduced brightness gives the track a more distant feeling, almost as though the record is receding from the listener rather than stopping. The title is slightly funny in that context. The music feels designed for the edge of sleep, but the repeated movement keeps tugging the ear back toward consciousness.
The physical LP shown here is especially well matched to the music. The front cover is mostly dark, with the image of a topless woman centered but partially obscured by black space, floral fragments and a cluster of colored geometric shapes. The nudity is not presented cleanly or glamorously. The body is interrupted by collage. The face is absent. Triangles and patterned fragments overlap the darker photographic material, while the small lowercase “young prisms” title sits almost apologetically in the lower-left corner. The effect is less erotic than disorienting. A recognizable human figure has been broken into zones of visibility and obstruction.
The back cover suddenly explodes into color. A large hand-made collage of triangular forms fills most of the sleeve with neon yellow, pink, orange, lavender, black-and-white checks, spray-painted marks, scribbles and metallic-looking patches. The contrast with the nearly black front is dramatic. That visual structure mirrors the record unusually well. The album begins in darkness and gradually becomes brighter and more saturated. The sleeve does the same thing physically when it is turned over.
The vinyl itself continues that color logic. The copy photographed here is translucent purple with a deep plum label, catalog number KR591. The label design is extremely restrained compared with the sleeve, using small pale type and the tiny Kanine dog logo. Side A lists “Friends For Now,” “If You Want To,” “Sugar,” “Eleni” and “In Your Room”; Side B contains “All Day Holiday,” “Breathless,” “Feel Fine,” “I Don’t Get Much” and “Stay Awake.” This translucent purple pressing is documented as the original U.S. Kanine edition rather than a later repress.
The supplied audio files also preserve the personality of a vinyl source rather than behaving like a perfectly normalized streaming master. Track levels vary. “Friends For Now” and “All Day Holiday” are notably quieter than the louder central songs. Brightness shifts dramatically from track to track, with “Breathless,” “In Your Room” and “Eleni” carrying much more upper-frequency energy than the darker opener or “Stay Awake.” That variation gives the sequence contour. The album does not sound like ten files flattened into the same shape.
AllMusic noted that the album was recorded at Ruminator Audio in San Francisco and The Pink Castle in Denver, and praised the way massive guitar noise remained light enough to avoid turning oppressive. That is a useful description because Friends For Now is loud without feeling heavy in the metal sense. Its mass is airy. The distortion floats as often as it crushes. The vocals can disappear into it without making the songs feel voiceless.
The album also captures a very specific San Francisco indie moment. Young Prisms were not isolated from the larger revival of shoegaze and neo-psychedelia happening around 2010 and 2011, but the record does not sound like a historical reenactment. There is too much garage abrasion, too much looseness, too much willingness to let things stay smeared. The band sounds more interested in what distortion can do to memory and melody than in reproducing the exact sonic signature of an older scene.
That is why the title works so well.
Friends for now.
Not forever.
Not permanent.
Just long enough for the guitars to blur the edges.
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