“What have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece?” George Orwell once wrote. “Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.”
Sometime in 2023, Trevor Powers was rooting around his parents’ basement and found a shoebox of old family videos. The audio from these videos, these scratchy fragments in time, formed a creative jumping-off point for ‘Rarely Do I Dream’, his fifth album as Youth Lagoon. The result is a dreamy, pillowy record that brings softness to rough and ready storytelling.
Powers is a fascinating character. His voice is broken and extraterrestrial, in some part due to a severe reaction to an over-the-counter medication he took in 2021, resulting in his stomach turning into a “non-stop geyser of acid”.
It was unclear whether he would ever sing again, and now that he does, he sounds like nobody else. The result is often very effective, as on Perfect World, which matches an arp-esque synth pattern with thin Midwestern mysticism, bulked out with fuzz guitar.
Parking Lot is another trip. Here, the protagonist keeps a gun in his car door and a Playboy under his car seat. An otherwise desperate character, he is elevated in the chorus. “Hail the king of the parking lot,” Powers sings of a kind of deadbeat vigilante. Throughout he creates a tapestry of grim loners, shot through with affection and just a little cynicism.
And, really, it’s the characters that you take away from ‘Rarely Do I Dream’. By embarking on this creative exercise in nostalgia, Powers has managed to get to a deeper truth about the community he was raised in. What starts out as a bit of a personal journey in Boise, Idaho becomes more of a community piece. Equally, what starts out as Nick Hornby emerges more like Ken Loach.
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