William Doyle’s second album as East India Youth further proves his exceptional skill for marshalling strange, intriguing ideas into coherent, accessible pop music
William Doyle’s first album as East India Youth was a pretty curious thing. It just wouldn’t sit still, jumping from Berlin-era Bowie to brutal electronics to dance music to Looking for Someone, the cascading harmonies of which suggested Fleet Foxes forced to abandon their instruments and make music on a laptop. By rights, Total Strife Forever should have sounded like what it ultimately was: a collection of ideas thrown together on the side by a musician whose band – Doyle and the Fourfathers, who specialised in precisely the kind of amiable-but-unremarkable indie-rock that provides the ballast on BBC 6 Music – was in the process of falling apart. But it didn’t, largely because Doyle seemed uncommonly good at whatever he tried his hand at. Listening to it, you could see why leftfield music website the Quietus felt impelled to start its own record label in order to release East India Youth’s debut EP. More surprising was that Total Strife Forever ended up gaining the kind of mainstream attention that seldom befalls artists championed by the Quietus: a Mercury prize nomination has, alas, proved unforthcoming for Acting the Rubber Pig by Daniel Patrick Quinn, or Chrononautz’s Public Domain Fuckover Series.
Related: East India Youth: giving a face, and a flowery shirt, to electronic music
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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian
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