All of a sudden you find yourself in your hometown, it’s eight and you wanted to be in Glasgow by now. Instead you’re 45 miles south of your starting point, some 30 miles south east of your previous station. It’s 30 minutes to Edinburgh and another hour to Glasgow, your heart sinks and you wish you’d just gone home.

When you switch trains in Edinburgh, you’re informed by the conductor that the track has re-opened at Stirling. You curse your luck and sit there stewing away. Still, you are not outwardly agrieved like most others. You accept your fate. “You get a few of these at this time of year,” says the conductor. “It gets near Christmas and people…” he trails off. He has no way of knowing its suicide, nor does anybody else. You suspect he’s right nonetheless.

You arrive in Glasgow and you’re angry. Angry because its taken over three and a half hours to make a journey that’s an hour and a half. Angry because you don’t like missing support acts. Guilty because you know you’re angry because somebody lost their life. 

You reach your gig, you’ve not missed the main acts. You sink a pint to make you feel better. It doesn’t. You have another anyway, hoping this time it might make a difference. Your singer cheers you up. You’re about to tell the idiot in the second row to shut up. “Shut up and show some respect,” you think to yourself. He leaves just as you pluck up the courage to do something. You get your book signed by your singer. He’s a long way from home and you know this cheered him up. 

The main act comes on and you forget all about your earlier woes. They work their magic, make you feel like this moment is all that matters. They laugh and smile and play and you listen and sing.

One life. Three and a half hours. Two acts. You go home and there are no problems now.

The album begins on a bit of an odd note for myself with the excellent Magdalen Bridge. The first half of which probably takes a little too long to get going, this is more than made up for by the excellent second half of the song however. This is perhaps the weakest track on the album precisely because of this slow start. I know gentle introductions can be nice, but it just takes too long to build. Additionally I found it a little disorienting at first as the song appears on Jonquil’s album Lions, albeit in a different form. As I’d heard that version first it took a few listens to re-adjust.

The next big point of contention for myself was the guitar at the beginning of The Last Night Of The Proms which was again a little odd at first. A few listens revealed it to be pleasing however. As a song it’s really interesting, it does achieve the remarkable feat of sounding like The Last Night Of The Proms while being an endearing and genuinely enthralling pop song.  That it can pull this off is largely due to the trumpet, which gives the feel of The Last Night without compromising any of the other instruments, or the composition generally.

Cannulae is an interesting case study, it’s the song on the album where the influence of Steve Reich is most obvious. This stripped down minimalist song has a fairly consistent guitar riff with fairly interesting percussion playing over the top of it. The song also ends with a pleasing refrain of “Rattle, snakes, snakes snakes.” Which is whispered wonderously.

If Cannulae was minimalist in terms of music, If You’d Seen A Battlefield does the same with lyrics. There are very few lyrics in the song, but a fair amount of singing. That this doesn’t seem overly repetitious is a neat trick to be able to pull off. If You’d Seen A Battlefield could easily be seen as the centerpiece of the album. It’s a pulsating song, and pulls off that particular Youthmovies trick of moving through a number of different sections but still remaining an extemely cohesive whole.

Something For The Ghosts has a habit of washing over me, it’s a very comforting song much like the album generally. With many interesting layers and again it’s a relatively song with a number of distinct, but related, sections. I always seem to pay attention as the song build to its climax and Andrew Mears can be heard singing “Motorway barriers make me feel like we’re going to crash.” The song seems to rouse from its slumber at this point and kick into a higher gear. Really from there the album never slows down.

The penultimate track; Archive It Everywhere was one of four I was familiar with before the album. However hearing the album version was a real treat. It’s another wonderuflly layered and sectioned song. With the ultimate for myself coming with the chanty vocals (it’s a recurring theme in songs I like) after a particularly dynamic section of singing from Andrew Mears. It’s such a delicate track generally, so melodic and with lots of wonderful little details. Yet being melodic doesn’t doesn’t mean songs lack punch, indeed Yotuhmovies land many more hits than any of their contemporaries.

I’ve not looked at every track here, and that’s definitely not my intention. I just wanted to highlight a few bits and pieces about the album. But more generally what makes Youthmovies so important is that they definitely don’t fit neatly into a genre. They deal with largely melodic music and more than a touch of the unusual and bizarre on terms of song structure. They have a good sense of dynamics more than anything, they know when a song needs to change volume, or pace to keep things interesting. Things march inexorably onwards, building towards a climx which never dissapoints.  They’re not post-rock, they’re not pure pop, they’re not indie. They just make good music, that this music is so beautiful and fragile while also being punchy and substantial is a remarkable feat. Good Nature is easily one of my favourite albums of the decade so far, it’s a wonderful little gem which will sadly probably be overlooked by many not willing to give it a chance.