The Subways, Young For Eternity

Sometimes the hype works, even if it’s not necessarily the way it was meant to. I’d heard so damn much about the Subways’ debut, Young For Eternity, before I ever actually heard it that realistically, any hopes I had for the band were ridiculously overblown and bound to be smashed into tiny little pieces as soon as I hit the “Play” button.

And yeah, that’s pretty much what happened. What I’d hoped for was some good, solid, balls-to-the-wall rawk, a Brit version of Australia’s equally youthful Vines and an antidote to all the shiny, super-processed retro-rock coming out of American speakers lately. On the first few listens, I was sorely disappointed — there were some decent songs, sure, but it wasn’t bowl-you-over brilliant. I shrugged, tossed it onto the pile, and moved on.

Later, though, I kept coming back to Young For Eternity, drawn back to the raucous fire of “Rock & Roll Queen,” the grimy, grinding rawk of “City Pavement,” and the magnificent roar of “Somewhere,” a track that marries the Smashing Pumpkins with Hendrix-y trippiness and closes the album with the coolest barrage of pummeling guitars and “Na-na-na” vocals imaginable. The disc, naturally, grew on me in a big way. And in the end, I got what I wanted, although I didn’t really know it at the time. As bandmates Billy Lunn (guitars/vocals), Charlotte Cooper (bass/vocals), and Josh Morgan (drums) plowed on through one roaring blast of amped-up guitar rock after another, I caught myself wanting to stop and listen more closely — and not to fun, fast, headbanging stuff like the title track, but to the quieter, more restrained tracks. I wanted to go back to stuff like the drifting, druggy “Lines Of Light,” a song that plays like the Verve’s Richard Ashcroft on a really Floydian trip, and album opener “I Want To Hear What You Have Got To Say,” which, while it’s still undoubtedly loud and raw, is also nicely contemplative and confused (and reminds me strangely at points of fellow Brits New Model Army).

Then I listen back to the warily sweet “Mary” a third or fourth time, wondering once again who the heck this Mary person is to let kids just hang out in her unfurnished flat, and when the thumping drums and plaintive yelp come crashing in, it hits me: the song is a picture-perfect reinvention of those surprisingly dark, disturbing pop-rock tunes from the ’60s that talked about car crashes, death, and the end of love. When Lunn hits the chorus in “Mary,” there’re echoes of Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” in particular, so much so that I keep waiting for the guy to break into the “I been walkin’ in the rain…” bit. Looking a little deeper into the rest of Young for Eternity, there’re splashes of ’50s/’60s pop-rock all over the place, from the Phil Spector-esque repeated chorus in “Rock & Roll Queen” to the more soul-sounding “Oh Yeah” (the chord progression of which brings to mind “Radar Love”). I know these kids probably claim Nirvana and Oasis as influences a lot more readily than they would, say, Buddy Holly, but I’ll be damned if they don’t sound to me like they’re channeling the essence of music that was made at least 30 years before they were born.

All of this makes a lot of sense, really, when you think about it. From its title onwards, Young For Eternity is a celebration of sorts of youth, and so were all those old songs by people like Dion and Frankie Valli. What’s more, neither those old songs nor the Subways are dumbed down to make things kid-friendly, but rather present the trials and tribulations of being young from the point of view of somebody who’s actually living through ’em. We have a tendency in our society to treat our young as overdramatic slackers who don’t know or experience anything, whether it’s loss or heartbreak or addiction or whatever else.

And that kind of thing comes near to a dangerous mass delusion, if you ask me. Face it: right now, your kids are going through all the things you did, and not all of those things are pretty or nice or safe. Sometimes the car is going too fast when it rounds the curve and plunges over the cliff, and sometimes that weird lady who lets kids hang around her flat is actually their connection (okay, so that’s probably only my interpretation, but you get my point). All that stuff exists, and it’s idiotic to pretend it doesn’t and expect young people to just sit down, be happy, and listen to nothing but cheery, vapid pop.

Anyway, my Andy Rooney-esque rant aside, the other nice thing about the Subways’ sound is that even when it’s raw and distorted and angry-sounding, there’s a kind of tender core beneath. Take “With You,” for example: the song is a furious blast of jagged rock, but the lyrics themselves are a damn sweet-hearted ode to a just-out-of-reach object of desire. Ditto for “Rock & Roll Queen” or the Supergrass-meets-Franz Ferdinand “Holiday,” where seemingly mindless blasts of full-on rock fury disguise the lovelorn teenage yearnings written out in the words. Is it deep, meaningful, all that crap? Nah, not really, but it is heartfelt, and that’s pretty crucial. Taken as a whole, Young For Eternity is an impressive collection of what are essentially dead-simple, timeless pop songs, dressed up in noise and fire. Forget the hype; I’ll gladly take what’s actually in there.