Scottish trio Young Fathers formed in 2008 and exploded to life in the 2010s on the strength of their first two mixtapes, launching them to success across the UK and Europe and catching the early eye of more astute American listeners in both old and new media. Throw on any of their albums and the draw is immediately understood – the band make exciting, layered music that leverages group vocals, huge percussion, and weird synth experiments to make unique and genre-defying music that has won them accolades across the past decade. This spirit remains true on their latest release, 2023’s Heavy Heavy, the first LP the band released in almost five years. They’ve been long absent from the east coast of the USA, and their visit to The Sinclair in Cambridge, MA is hotly anticipated. The crowd fills every level of the club on a Wednesday night in April, and what takes place ought to go down as one of the most exciting performances in recent memory.
Young Fathers now travel as six (or sometimes seven) instead of their initial three, multiplying nearly every component of their performance. Vocalists Kayus Bankole, Graham Hastings, and Alloysious Massquoi are joined by Kimberly Mandindo, whose fourth vocal quickly proves to be essential, emphasizing the pre-existing tradeoffs between singers. Drummer Steven Morrison plays in a power stance behind the kit, a giant tom in the center and Swiss-cheesed cymbals on each side. Massaquoi or Mandindo occasionally take up yet another drum, too. The entire outfit is incredibly mobile onstage, except for Callum Easter when he’s required on the keys or xylophone, these singular contributions giving the songs trademark elements of contrast. But he gets to cut loose on guitar at times as well, and the continuous rotations of each musician around the stage and between instruments highlights their versatility as a troupe, and the sense of perpetual motion adds to the performance.
It’s impossible not to want to move while watching Young Fathers perform, unthinkable to deny the call to ‘Get Up’ – much of their set has the vibe of a party, truly jovial; those tom drums and shouted vocals combine to make a sound that fills the room in the way only certain things can. Songs like ‘Rice’ from Heavy Heavy surround you with their massiveness, reminiscent of a church choir – the type of thing that can transcend context and bring anyone’s jaw to the proverbial floor. Even seen in a studio session at KEXP, the band is every bit as animated as they are playing live. After a short tease of ‘Get Started’, the first full song the band plays is ‘Queen Is Dead’, which they released nine years before that title took on its new context fairly recently. It springs from its introductory passage with a huge warcry, the crowd embracing the vigor that the band brings from moment one of their performance. All three core members of the band grew up in Scotland; Massaquoi was born in Liberia; Bankole lived in his parents’ home of Nigeria for a time – there’s no shortage of reasons anyone writing songs in Young Fathers might feel a healthy degree of animosity towards the monarchy of what was once the British Empire.
‘Wow’ sees the first appearance of the extra tom in the hands of Massaquoi. One of the highlights from Cocoa Sugar, it balances its double-percussion engine and bassy synth heartbeat with Easter’s xylophone ushering it along in its verses. Each of the vocalists takes a turn here, dragging out the song’s title with a sarcastic affect to highlight the vacuousness of the pop-lyric skeleton it puppeteers. Throughout the evening Hastings can be seen controlling tracks from a large cabinet with dozens of knobs and switches, and at one point early on Bankole sings a portion of a song through an old landline telephone – another hallmark of Young Fathers’ music is the use of different vocal textures between lead and backing singers to give the transitions common in their songs more flow and definition.
The set demonstrates the gorgeous variation of the band’s compositions, from the off-kilter, jagged riff that plucks its way through all of ‘Old Rock n Roll’, to the quasi-chiptune intro of ‘I Heard’. The latter is one a couple well-placed moments where the set slows down, bringing the vocal ensemble together in a painfully-beautiful refrain. ‘Drum’ is breathy poetry in its chorus paired with a standout performance from Massaquoi and a passage sung in the Yoruba language. The ecstatic vocals that close the track recall Animal Collective’s excellent ‘For Reverend Green’ in the way their piercing beauty soars over those percussive underpinnings. ‘Geronimo’ also brings the tempo down, but it escalates into one of the biggest crescendos of the entire night. The song contains some of the band’s best writing, declaring: “Legacies are for the sad, the wicked, and hurt / nobody goes anywhere, really / dressed up just to go in the dirt”. It segues into the final stretch of the set, with the jangly ‘Shame’ and the hymnal-like ‘I Saw’ showing off the vocalists in different but equally-powerful ways, the former comprised of many differing parts, the latter bringing mostly everyone together for another of Heavy Heavy’s choir-like moments.
But it’s a dive back into the darker sonics of Cocoa Sugar for the very last song in Cambridge – a fuzzy bass returning paired with a frantic, staccato synth, the vocalists harmonizing in their lower registers, relatively calm. But the bridge dispenses with that restraint, everyone shouting, and the song keeps going into an extended outro one feels as if it could go on forever should the band so desire. But eventually some signal is given and they bring things to a close – Morrison knocks over his drum set from its perch bit by bit, and each of the members departs the stage ’til Hastings remains alone, stoic, leaning up against his machinery, waiting to move the final knob or switch to cut the signal. The room brightens, and there’s a sense that, even among those at the center of the floor who’ve been moving most, that even though they may be tired in one sense, they’ve been refreshed and uplifted in another.
Photos and review by Collin Heroux
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