ZapTown

Young Gods
Only Heaven
1995 – Play It Again Sam

Origin: Geneva, Switzerland
Style: Industrial

1995 was a strange year for industrial music. It soaked up the albums that exploded the year earlier, and gave other bands time to spend in the studio. It was a period still caught in transition while the pioneers were weeding themselves out. Nine Inch Nails was still riding the high horse from The Downward Spiral, and industrial was barking up the heavy metal tree with more ferocious guitar-driven songs thanks to KMFDM and Ministry beginning the trend in the early ‘90s. This was the new Industrial.

On the other end of the electronic spectrum, dance bands like Orbital were reaping the benefits from the popular release Snivilisation, and a band that helped pave the path for bands like Meat Beat Manifesto and The Prodigy to push out into the forefront. This was the beginning of the new era of electronic music. It also saw influential industrialists like Killing Joke and Front 242 struggle to stay on top.

But for The Young Gods, despite several monumental albums, they never reached their apex of fame like they should have, a shame at the time but a blessing in disguise as the band always have created their own destiny and adapted throughout the years. For a group of Swiss the Industrial aspect of the band has always been at geographical odds, siding more with the French than the German, the English, or the American style. Their ideology is versatile, as Stephane Herve for dsp2000 makes it sound like poetry, “a magical universe of sound, landscapes and emotions attracting a huge and eclectic following, still surprised by the many different aspects of their music.” (http://www.arobance.com/younggods3.html)

And for Only Heaven, they were not just keeping up with the times but surpassing them with their metallic palette of guitar sampling and thunderous tribal drum pounding, almost to an explosive effect because but amazingly turning the chaos into an elegant symphonic of otherworldly music. Their rhythmic approach follows the lead of San Francisco’s Grotus and their raucous physical tribalism of Brown, but goes far beyond the machinist drum epilepsy of Godflesh’ Streetcleaner and Pure.

If I needed a soundtrack to the universe, this is it. To me, this is what the cosmos sounds like. I can close my eyes and the swirling, pounding, vibrating electronic sounds, hums, and pure power go beyond any world I can pinpoint on a copy of National Geographic.

The charm of Only Heaven lies in the continuation of experimentalism and ambient curiosity that is as flawless as the breath you are taking. There isn’t an immediate harshness to their heavy side or an unbecoming dullness to their wave of meandering sounds. If you paid close attention, you caught an example of it on “September Song” and their homage album to Kurt Weill.

For lead vocalist Franz Treichler, Only Heaven was not just a follow-up from TV Sky, but an re-examination that goes back to their first album. “It’s also a return to the experimentalism of the first L.P.,” he said (http://www.younggods.com/archives/younggods99/story.htm). Maybe so, but this stuff is light years beyond the rough cuts on their self-titled album, and even more atmospheric and progressive than on TV Sky.

This is apparent with the epic song “Moon Revolutions,” a sixteen-and-a half minute song that takes the essence of TV Sky’s ending opus “Summer Eyes,” but pushes the sonic landscape into harsher rock aesthetics and expansive ambient flowing electronic samples swirling around.

If TV Sky was the outwardly accessible rock album, then Only Heaven is the artistic plunge into the deep into the ethos of organic Industrialism. From the guitar crunch powertrip of “Strangel” to the soft-spoken haze of “Dreamhouse” the band leaves it up to you to create the reality. The only song that is certain is the finale, “Child In A Tree,” a song Treichler wrote based on the true story of a man who died from an overdose while hiding in a tree from the Zurich police.

Cross-Reference: Killing Joke, Einsturzende Neubeuten, Tangerine Dream.