really smart series by publisher! the details of this originally UK based group (specifically Cardiff) and their travails are set out vigorously and in enough detail for the aficionado. I got a good sense of how a group grows musically and then can stumble over itself. This series also tends inevitably to cover that historical moment, and the attitudes of the day that drove the music. I trust this series will carry on - really clever.

An overdue review for a long overdue book.

I first read about Young Marble Giants back around 1980. I think Lou Stathis reviewed it and made it sound pretty good. But it was 1980. I never saw a copy of Colossal Youth anywhere, so it pretty much faded out of my mind. Then, in the mid-1990s, I found a copy of Salad Days, a demo collection, in a record store, and bought it. It was pretty good, and by then it was a lot easier to order albums, so I got Colossal Youth on CD, and it was one of those albums that just fits in perfectly with everything else I listen to.

But enough about me. Colossal Youth is one of those postpunk albums that could be called antipunk, given its quiet songs, coolly amateurish and deadpan female vocals, primitive drum machine, etc, but it probably would never have existed without punk, and Hole's cover of their song "Credit in the Straight World" shows that it isn't really that hard to bring some YMG into noisier territory.

Everyone from Kurt Cobain to the xx, it seems, has spoken of the influence Colossal Youth had on them; you can hear it in a lot of places, odd though it must have sounded in 1979. This book sets the album and band in context as a trio from Cardiff, removed in many ways from punk, but arguably even further removed from whatever the mainstream was there at the time. It's not one of those 33 1/3 books that talk much about the studio experience or the gear or any of the technical side of making the album, because all they had was a homemade drum machine, a ring modulator, a bass guitar, an organ, and an electric guitar -- and with only three band members, few if any songs used all of those instruments, and the album only took a week or so to record.

Instead, the book talks about the music, about the contrast between the emotional lyrics written by a male band member and the unemotional way they were sung by the female band member; about being from Cardiff instead of London; about the feminism and politics that observers picked up on even when they weren't intentional. There's a bit about what the band members did before and after, which is especially helpful for a band with only one proper album in their discography.

The book's a bit academic at times. You'll see references to Susan Sontag, Julia Kristeva, Dick Hebdige, and others. But it's still always readable and accessible.

Overall, a much-needed tribute to an album you should know.

(Not the kind of book my library buys, alas.)

In the 25 years or so I’ve been aware of Young Marble Giants I’ve never known more than a cursory background to the band, first pre-internet from a few paragraphs in a ’90s ‘indie and new wave encyclopaedia’ and later the almost identical entry on Wikipedia. The question that arises from this has to be is there any more to tell? I’d expected, not least because it’s written by two young American men, that this book would start with some context on YMG and their considerable influence on the musicians that came after them, particularly in US alternative music. Many people will come to YMG through their influence on Peter Buck, Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Calvin Johnson, Stephin Merritt, Dean Wareham etc. and this contextualises the importance of Colossal Youth as a ground-breaking and historically important album. This is, unfortunately, the first weakness in Joe Bucciero and Michael Blair’s appraisal of Colossal Youth, they give no sense of why the album is significant or indeed why we should want a deeper understanding of it.

When reading this book I tried constantly to keep my initial question ‘is there any more to tell?’ in the back of my mind. It’s undoubtedly difficult to construct a whole book around a band when their entire physical legacy is a couple of hours of recorded music and a smattering of 35-year-old music press interviews. That said, it feels a very naïve book. It draws heavily on Simon Reynolds’ liner notes for the 2007 reissue of Colossal Youth, pulling at threads from his excellent piece, but never quite managing to tie them together. It also suffers from a lack of structure, from repetition and what comes across as a very crude understanding of social context. A better anchoring of YMG within post-punk would have really helped here. YMG are regularly referred to as being a punk band - you could excuse this as semantics, but it makes an awful lot of difference when you’re trying to get to grips with where a band are coming from. To paraphrase Tony Wilson’s distinction, punk said ‘fuck you’ while post-punk said ‘we’re fucked’ and this seems quite significant in the context of this particular musical fable.

So is there any more to the Young Marble Giants’ story than can be done justice in a Wikipedia entry? Of course, and Bucciero and Blair make a gallant attempt to pull various interview sources together into an expanded history, however, structural issues mean most of this history has been told by the time one is a third of the way through the book, leaving the last two-thirds floundering. I kind of wish I’d stopped reading at this point and would then have avoided the cringe-worthy chapter on gender – guys, you know we don’t ask ‘what’s it like to be a girl in a band?’ anymore, right?

A flawed book that makes the most of the resources available, but doesn’t really go beyond that.

A very good in-depth look at one of the most idiosyncratic album of its time (and ours as well). I appreciated the authors' scope in analyzing the birth of the group, their dynamics and the conception of Colossal Youth. Definitely one of the best 33 1/3 I've read.