Young Marble Giants-Colossal Youth(1980)

"It's cult has just kept growing over the years."

British trio Young Marble Giants were the Raymond Carver of the post-punk era. While the band's lone album, 1980's COLOSSAL YOUTH, incorporated the influences of punk, dub, and funk as per the spirit of the times, these sounds were filtered through a homespun, minimalist sensibility.

Recorded dry, with no reverb or other effects, the scratchy guitar, bobbing bass, and thrift-store organ are transmuted into a striking modernist tableaux, with Alison Statton's appropriately affectless voice floating above.

COLOSSAL YOUTH prefigured post-rock by some 15 years, but this generous repackaging appending EP and single cuts as well as early recordings and live material is a testament to their lasting influence. There really ought to be more bands like Young Marble Giants, which doesn't mean that there ought to be more bands that sound like Young Marble Giants.

They came out of the nowheresville of Cardiff, Wales; they didn't particularly have a local scene to buoy them up, or a niche to fit into. What they had was an aesthetic that was totally theirs, a sound and style that essentially had no antecedents.

Play any six seconds of any YMG song and you'll know exactly who you're listening to, and probably be thunderstruck by its unsentimental beauty of tone.