Youth Lagoon @ Fairmount Theatre▪

Tonight is one of those nights I thought I would never experience again. When Trevor Powers called time on his Youth Lagoon project back in 2016, it was kinda devastating. His 2011 debut album The Year Of Hibernation was a record I lived inside, and I was grateful to have been able to catch his magical live show a couple of times following that. But then it was all over.

Until now. Out of nowhere, a few months ago came the sudden resurrection of the Youth Lagoon project, and with that, the acclaimed new record Heaven Is A Junkyard, awarded a Best-New-Music 8.3 by the mighty Pitchfork. And that’s not all – a tour!

And a tour that includes Montreal!

Needless to say, I am pretty excited as I walk into the first Youth Lagoon show in Montreal in 11 years, and as I arrive inside the cozy Theatre Fairmount, it’s clear that a sizeable chunk of the city feels the same way. The cheers are triumphant as Trevor and his 2-piece band arrive on stage. Rabbit is a perfect way to open the set, feeling almost like a nursery rhyme as swirling spotlights accompany Trevor’s delicate piano; Prizefighter is an equally perfect melody. With the sound being very piano-heavy, there isn’t a lot of opportunity for Trevor to leave his seat, but when the opportunity presents itself on Deep Red Sea, he duly takes it, making a quick foray to the front row to a welcome-home reception!

The Sling is probably the most fragile moment of the 70-minute set, and 17 starts equally delicate, the latter still sounding incredible all these years later. All the songs from The Year Of Hibernation sound absolutely ageless; Afternoon and Montana (which sounds almost like an epilogue to Afternoon) draw some of the biggest cheers of the night.

That’s not to say it’s all soft and delicate; partway through The Sling, the guitars join in so heavily that the bass makes my glasses rattle, and on Mute, the bass is equally as monstrous despite nobody actually playing the bass in that moment. I guess we have Trevor’s keys to thank for that! Dropla, which closes out the encore, is massive in its own way, simmering down to a delicate crawl to lull us into thinking it’s all over before rumbling back to life in an epic crescendo. Things even take a funk turn on Little Devil from the Country! The mellow trundle of Idaho Alien and the distorted keys of Cannons sit somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, but both sound absolutely perfect too.

As Trevor sings the chorus of Mercury, from where I am stood, his head blocks the spotlight immediately behind him, causing its light to refract into beams in all different directions around him. It looks like a halo, like he himself is glowing as he sings, “does heaven glow, glow like Mercury?”

And that’s the perfect adjective to sum up tonight’s triumphant return to Montreal.

Heavenly.