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Well, the leaves are changing and the days are getting shorter, so here’s a great lp to play on your headphones while you take a walk in the fall night and contemplate the direction of your life and all that important shit. The Wipers 1981 classic, ”Youth Of America”is their second lp overall, but it’s personally my favorite from their catalog. It’s far less straight forward than ’79’s “Is This Real”, opting for more melancholy and stretched out almost Kraut-rock inspired pieces that emphasize repetition. It’s also extremely catchy, and still very poppy, although the level of mournfulness is probably deeper than anything previous.

A particular aspect of Youth Of America that I love is that it’s produced and engineered by The Wipers main man, Greg Sage (who was already the only remaining original member on this album). The guitars ring and echo with delay and vintage sounding fuzz tones, but are quite bright and defined. A lot of Wipers music is a showcase for Sage’s sinewy and spare guitar lines that sometimes remind me of what might happen if the early (punky) Cure material went on a surfing trip with The Ventures. The Bass is a nice round rumbling sound that fills in the bottom end as the guitar is often playing single higher notes. The drums are tight and snappy, there’s some echo on the snare, but they’re actually fairly compact sounding compared to the vast echo of the guitar. The drumming is typically circular with its patterns, and provides the solid backbeat for Sage to work off of. Again, it kind of takes me to a Ventures type space in my mind, but with much darker music built on top of it.

Side A is the more direct of the two, starting with Taking Too Long, which  is almost power pop in its delivery, right down to the fact that it plays at the optimum pop song length of 3 minutes (well 3:07). Sage works a nice little guitar lead into this one during the intro that gets your toes tapping. He sticks with the upbeat flavor for the next track, Can This Be, which is also right around 3 minutes, and almost goes in a Ramones direction with a Chuck Berry type guitar progression, and a great rock ‘n roll ascending riff in the chorus. By the next song though, Pushing The Extreme, the pop shell is starting to crack a little bit. The song still has a hummable tune, but it’s more aggressive and also a bit more melancholy, with a guitar overdub that sounds like Sage is leaning on a tremolo bar. When It’s Over finds Sage contemplating his on mortality, sounding like a funeral dirge sped up to 78rpms. It works as a nice segue to the second half of the record, its indisputable centerpiece.

No Fair opens side B with a sad sounding guitar dirge, that the bass and drums fill into after a few measures. Sage inserts some spoken prose over it painting a pretty despairing picture from the get go that’s a lament on the futility of modern life. There’s a pause for a couple seconds of silence, and then the bass guitar builds up with the drums before the song kicks into a nice quick tempo. Sage sings in his recognizable mid-range about urban alienation and anomie as the band continues the minor-key assault until a fade out. The title track is the big closer and it’s been noted as a reaction against the increasing brevity that was becoming common in hardcore and punk songs, as it clocks in at about 10 and a half minutes, though it never actually slows down beyond a standard punk tempo.  The melody that the song constantly returns to is instantly recognizable, mournful, and unsettling. The bass and drums pulse in another surfy sounding configuration, the guitar cutting in and out through the duration sometimes issuing sheets of heavy feedback, others soloing, sometimes working the grey area between the two. The lyrics make plain the point of the song from the getgo:

Youth of America is living in the jungle
Fighting for survival with the wrong place to go
Youth of America the pressure’s all around
The walls are coming down the walls are crumbling down on you

When the chorus kicks in, it’s big, arena sized even, maybe almost triumphant sounding but ultimately the track leaves the listener without closure, even fading out, suggesting that it may have actually been longer in its original incarnation.

Of course this is the original pressing on Park Avenue records, though if you’ve never heard it, I recommend picking up the very nice reissue that’s available in most record stores on 180 gm vinyl. Too bad this copy’s in Germany… HIGH postage.