Wondrous Bughouse turns out to be a surprisingly appropriate title for the second album from Trevor Powers. Better known as Youth Lagoon, the 22 year old’s sophomore record is a study in life, mortality and curiosity. Powers’s first effort, The Year of Hibernation, is quintessentially a bedroom album. Recorded alone in his basement and best listened to through headphones, it offers a heady and haunted look at teenage angst. But where that album was dreamy and sparse, this one offers a slicker, more dense take on things. Drenched in reverb and synthesizers, you get the sense that these tracks are set from the perspective of above — looking down on the world as it churns away.
“You’ll never die, you’ll never die,” Powers chants on “Dropla,” one of the many references to mortality. But for all of the overt callouts to death, the album has a decidedly optimistic feel to it. Like a boy peering through the glass of a bughouse or aquarium, this is a man intoxicated by the simple act of being young and alive. (Fat Possum, fatpossum.com/artists/youth-lagoon) Andrew Friesen