Youth Lagoon
Rarely Do I Dream
Release Date: Feb 21, 2025
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Fat Possum
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Album Review: Rarely Do I Dream by Youth Lagoon
Excellent, Based on 4 Critics
Based on rating 8.5/10
With Rarely Do I Dream, a new album inspired by the discovery of home video tapes from his childhood, Trevor Powers flips the script on the Youth Lagoon story, delivering what is easily the most warm and hopeful music he has yet released. A press release states that Powers "wanted the music to feel like life itself," and that goal is apparent in every minute of this album. He has undoubtedly undergone a major transformation over the last few years: where Youth Lagoon's earlier albums, particularly the debut A Year of Hibernation, were just as focused on memory, nostalgia, and the pain of lived moments slipping further into the past, this album is the first to look back and primarily find joy.
Based on rating 8/10
These recordings were like windows peering into a life I could never touch. In ways I couldn't articulate then, it felt like watching ghosts -- versions of the people I loved, frozen in a time before I existed. My parents were unlined and bright-eyed, their hair still untouched by grey. My brothers, innocent and brimming with wonder, had not yet been tossed into the storms they didn't know awaited them.
Based on rating 4
Nostalgic and contemporary, these songs evoke the warm glow of childhood, but with a creeping menace never too far away Three years ago, Trevor Powers went back to the start. Powers first appeared on our radars as Youth Lagoon, recording three albums under that moniker between 2011 and 2015, before ‘retiring’ the persona, and making music under his real name. And then, his life changed in an unimaginable way.
Opinion: Excellent
Shortly after rebooting Youth Lagoon, Trevor Powers found himself in his parents' basement. Searching for an old harmonica, he instead stumbled upon a box of home videos documenting his childhood. Sensing something important in the innocent tapes of birthdays, bike rides and Easter egg hunts, he set to work clipping bits of sound from the videos and interspersing them with the songs he had been writing for Rarely Do I Dream, the fifth Youth Lagoon record and second since Powers returned to the moniker he had retired in 2016.
'Rarely Do I Dream'
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