Young Marble Giants - Colossal Youth & Selected Works

Monolithic reissue package

YMG’s delicate sounds have travelled through time and space since their original creation in the late 70s. Most definitely not riding the post-punk wave, but rather skating around it with a fragile Rickenbacker/proto-drum machine drone, generation after generation have latched on to their melodies and, it must be said, naivety.

Reissued to coincide with a reformation gig at the Hay-on-Wye book festival earlier this year, Colossal Youth, surely the Cardiffians’ defining work, is lucky enough to sound fresh today. It’s a rare treat then, in this snapshot age, that the record sounds all at once futuristic (it predates traditional drum machines by two years) and timeless. Credit In The Straight World, tucked away in the album’s closing moments, tells you all you need to know – picked guitar strings from mainman Stuart Moxham’s guitar, atop Peter Joyce’s stuttering rhythms, all bound by Alison Statton’s crushingly innocent vocal lines. Kurt Cobain listed the group as his second favourite (after The Vaselines), and you can trace a clear lineage.

This package is complete, even including the early-workcompiled- but-never-released Salad Days album, as well as a hastily compiled Peel sessions CD. Manna for Marblelites then.

Domino | cat no tbc (3-CD)

Reviewed by Jake Kennedy
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