Various Artists - Young And Lost Club Compilation

The Young And Lost Club is a London based (and pretty London-centric) record label that for the past five years has been specialising in the sort of guitar pop that made ‘taste-makers’ of the mid-to-late 2000’s go absolutely crazy. This compilation, imaginatively called The Young And Lost Club compilation, is a celebration of those five years, and presents a warts ‘n all look at their releases. Across two CDs the two ladies behind the label have cherry picked 32 of their 50 releases, 15 of which we have here in front of us, in the form of a sampler.

Like we said, this is a fairly London-centric sample and with the hype that was put upon many of these groups it’s entirely possible that you’re going to have heard a lot of their names but not any of their music. At least not that you can remember. That’s not to say these bands are all hype and no substance, it’s pretty surprising how high quality the majority of this music is, even if on occasion there lacks something in variety. The low point here is of course Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong, and even then they’re not terrible. It’s very hard to see what the fuss was about, on both sides with JL&TJJJ, they may well have provided the least memorable piece of music, in ‘Lucio Starts Fires’ of the last ten years.

We’ve dwelt on the negative enough already. What are the highlights? After all, this compilation has got a good enough score that you should really consider buying it. Firstly there’s Pull Tiger Tail, whose ‘Animator’ is a spiky pop treat that should really have taken the band to the giddy heights of the charts. Sadly they’re no more, but the full version of this comp also gives you ‘Mary Jane’ which should take the sting a little, on that front. Current press darlings Bombay Bicycle Club give us the meaty ‘Evening/Morning’, next brilliant things Everything Everything’s wonderfully odd ‘MY KYZ, UR BF’ points the way to the future and bona fide stars Noah & the Whale crop up three times with ‘Five Years Time’, ‘2 Bodies 1 Heart’ and ‘Blue Skies’ – all of which are fantastic.

What about the rest that never made it, then? Well, you only need to look at the tracklisting really: Vincent Vincent & the Villains (whose ’50s rock n roll is far better in retrospect than it sounded at the time), Good Shoes (who are still plodding along to ever diminishing returns), Larikin Love (much missed in some quarters) and Fear of Flying (now sounding completely different and selling bucket loads of records as White Lies).

Despite the girls from the label having said they might be slowing down on the releases front due to a lack of really great new bands emerging at the moment, the end of the five year celebratory CD actually paints a rather positive picture. Oh Minnows and Magic Wands both bring something new to the table, that at times is worlds away from the jangling that we’ve been used to hearing from the London scene for the majority of Y&LCs existence. Still, happy fifth. And here’s to many more.