Young Marble Giants - Colossal Youth, Salad Days (1979, 1980)

Mmm. Yum. Can't Say I Have?
Mo Wait! That's All Fang Rong.

This feels like an exercise in DUH.
But, it felt rite so alright -- tonight.
And never forget... that when you

"ass-u-me"
...

allmusic: One of the quirkiest and most idiosyncratic groups to emerge from the early British new wave indie scene, Young Marble Giants (via Cardiff, Wales) were not so much new wave in sound as in strategy. They subverted conventional pop/rock methods by stripping both song construction and instrumentation to its

'ess-en-ce'.

Pop minimalism of the first order,
it now stands as one of the
fist fully formed expressions of
the subgenre that would be called post-punk.

HEAR COLOSSAL YOUTH

allmusic:
Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth is a collection of

sparse, evocative tunes
emphasizing Alison Statton's floating vocals
and minimal guitar/organ/bass/drum machine arrangements.

Comparable to little else from its time or since,
this is rock music at its most austere.

rocky says:
(oh! and it is so nice, wen
wee and tzee criticks agreee!)

HEAR SALAD DAYS

allmusic: It's rare for any band's earliest recordings to warrant attention outside of their most fanatical followers, but in the case of the Young Marble Giants' Salad Days -- a collection of 15 songs dating back to their very first home studio sessions -- such interest is rewarded;

although "every note quite" as brilliant as their Colossal Youth album, this set is an even purer distillation of the group's "true essence", with the inherent primitivism of the demo process providing the perfect context for their consciously minimalist pop.

It's remarkable to consider how fully formed and distinctive Stuart Moxham's reductivist musical vision was even in its infancy -- these early stabs at classic YMG songs like "N.I.T.A.," "Constantly Changing," and "Eating Noddemix" are intimate + mysterious at the same time, distinguished by the austere spaciousness of their ingenious arrangements and the icy allure of Alison Statton's vocals.