Music Review: Young Widows, Easy Pain

By Jeffery X Martin

Imagine being thrown through a fortieth story window. Hear that rush of wind in your ears, the whistling and howling blotting out everything but your own panicked shrieks, your clothing ripping and flapping in the wind, pounding out a flat parachute rhythm as you continue to plummet, a failed bird, picking up speed, the ground rushing towards you (or vice versa) and even if you aren’t precisely sure where you’re landing, you know it’s going to be hard and it’s going to hurt. There’s nothing to do but resign yourself to it, embrace it, and let whatever happens happen.

That description fairly accurately echoes the first sixty seconds of Easy Pain by Louisville band Young Widows. There are still nine more songs to go.

This album is a monster. It is loud. It roars. It barely holds itself together. Young Widows vibrates at a frequency that would make Deepak Chopra wet himself. They are able to pull order from chaos but, for the most part, choose not to.

These guys are founding members of the First Church of His Lordship, Steve Albini. Why drive when you can overdrive? Why start with a conventional song structure when you can keep the listener guessing until well after the first chorus? It is as if they were raised in a poorly ventilated basement and forced to listen to nothing but Shellac at Action Park and Big Black’s Songs about Fucking, piped in through a constantly open landline.

You do realize this is high praise, right? And you understand that you must absorb this album immediately, so that it finds a warm place inside of you, living forever within you as a disruptor of thought and deed? When you speak, nothing will come out but the feedback bee-buzz of “Kerosene Girl,” all swirling madness. Your attempts at coherent thought will sound like the flat guitar spasms of leadoff track “Godman.” Your heart will beat in random blast beats, coming with no warning, leaving with no trace.

Fans of noise and implied violence will love Easy Pain. Young Widows, a power trio, serves as the Anti-Rush. No poly-rhythmical tales of ancient mystical lands here; only small harsh tales of localized madness. This is no place for fragile pretty things. Consider this your warning.

This album is brutal and will make you feel like you’re falling forever. But when you hit? You’ll find a glorious epiphany that stretches your musical boundaries and makes you wonder what there ever was to be afraid of.

Easy Pain by Young Widows was released May 13 on Temporary Residence, Ltd. It is available for purchase wherever fine music is sold.