Youth Is Only Ever Fun in Retrospect

Photographers: Phil Smithies; Jasmine Igoe; Emma Viola Lilja.
Britain quartet Sundara Karma arrive with shimmering guitars and great expectations, delivering a lengthily titled pop treatise on youth in the modern age. Produced by Larry Hibbitt (Hundred Reasons, Nothing But Thieves), Youth Is Only Ever Fun in Retrospect introduces the Reading-bred newcomers' warmly anthemic sound and barely earned nostalgia. In frontman Oscar Pollack, the band have a charismatic, if somewhat familiar voice that can ably power these 12 tracks all the way back to the cheap seats, where they seem squarely aimed. Opener "A Young Understanding" sets the table in terms of dynamics with Pollack's robust vocals punctuating a soaring, circular guitar pattern that reaches for the rafters and hangs on. In both tone and color, there is much of the '80s rock-adoring earnestness in Sundara Karma's sound as they strive for mid-period Springsteen desperation while sometimes borrowing Big Country's knife-like guitar leads. By and large, though, this is 21st century rock written and played for a youthful (that word again) target audience of their peers that takes dynamic cues from first-wave millennial rockers like Arcade Fire and the Killers. High points like the opener, "Olympia," and the slowly building "Be Nobody" show a band with stadium-sized ambitions and a penchant for dramatic pop hooks. ~ Timothy Monger