Young Team

iTunes Review

Young Team came out originally in 1997, well after Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, and Slint had laid the groundwork for a sub-genre eventually tagged “post rock,” which came to be defined by Scotland’s Mogwai and a few other bands in the ‘90s.  Fans were awed by Mogwai’s ability to build their music with seemingly simple yin/yang manipulations, balancing weight and weightlessness, delicacy and brutality, spatial silences and layers of dense noise with uncanny precision. Young Team soon became an iconic record of the post-rock scene, and a decade after its original release, Chemikal Underground celebrates the notable debut with this remastered reissue package, which includes a number of hard to find tracks from compilations, live concerts and radio/tv sessions. Their cover of Spacemen 3’s “Honey” is a shimmering beauty, and outtakes “Young Face Gone Wrong” and “I Don’t Know What To Say” epitomize the range of textures the band works with so masterfully. The live versions of the album’s pillar tracks, “Like Herod” and “Mogwai Fear Satan,” are satisfying even in their relative brevity. Purists, worry not: the remastering has only lightened the occasional murk, and improved the work overall.