The Discover Tab's Album Club #03 (January 2025)
Young Man's Beyond was All Around Me (2013)
Previous Album Club Editions:
October 2024: Strawberry Switchblade’s Strawberry Switchblade (1985)
November 2024: Koufax’s Social Life (2002)
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As always, please reach out on the hellsite, the better site, or join the Rosy Overdrive Discord server where I can be found now and again. You can also find me in the corners of Rate Your Music scrounging for obscure emo, hardcore, indie rock and pop punk.
Colin Caulfield got their start in music uploading cover songs to YouTube. In many ways, they exemplified the kind of 00s success stories that happened across the blog-focused online music scene. Whether it was a chillwave artist blowing up via Hype Machine or an indie-sleaze act getting Pitchfork coverage after making the blog rounds, this kind of thing happened a lot back then. Caulfield would go from covers, to a string of records as Young Man, finally to current and long-standing member of DIIV.
Beyond Was All Around Me sounds like a natural progression for Colin Caulfield, as he rounds out a trilogy of indie-pop albums that documented the passage from youth-to-adulthood with strikingly gorgeous results. The guitars shimmer and strum, tempos build and recede, structures meander and then click back into place at a moments notice, all while strings rise in to mirror the dramatics of Colin’s lyrics. If it sounds impenetrable from that description, that’s not the case at all – the songs are every bit as rewarding melodically as they are challenging. There are certainly not many albums released in the past year that hang together as a whole as well as Beyond Was All Around Me – an impressive feat for an artist of any age.
Young Man records garnered a lot of comparison to timely acts like Deer Hunter / Atlas Sound, Panda Bear etc. but for me I hear a lot of melodic indie rock bands like The Sea and Cake, Built to Spill and others in here - the kind of bands who mine for pop nuggets while also stretching out and getting a little psychedelic or jazzy from time to time. That said, the album also makes sense in the context of 00s rock - the clean, chiming and reverb-soaked guitars, the vague post-punk (but not enough to register as containing any actual punk) and maybe even some of Grizzly Bear’s earlier work.
This would be the final release from Young Man before Caulfield shifted focus entirely to the world of Diiv, but if you dig what you hear here, their 2012 LP Vol. 1 is also great.
Take a listen and let me know what you think either in the comments, or in the Substack chat.
That’s it, that’s all. Be excellent to one other.