Canyons made of tiny breaths: Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth

Through the blackness that the cover art has implanted comes a tiny rhythm, a string of tiny white knots that sound like the drum machine on a Casio. As it makes its way into the lightless room it is followed by a bright but palm muted electric guitar with a simple chord progression. Then a large cool female voice takes over with a song about Searching for Mr Right. This is delicate and continues to keep itself vulnerable throughout its three minutes. There is no development. It comes and goes but between those two events it shuts you up. It's confident and faltering at the same time. The voice at its centre seems to be both still at school and well past the kind of hunting that the song is about but somewhere between the two states there's a moment of recognition that both can relate to when she sings the words: lose you against the light. The voice is tired and numb from disappointment. It is intensely saddening.

The album goes on, one miniature song after another, all clipped guitar, stark picked trebly bass guitar, organ, drum machine and that barely musical voice asking questions with the lights out.

N.I.T.A. has all of these elements but takes the cameo angst before it a step further with the description of a coupling that didn't survive its first fiery stages seen years after when the other is part of a new family. The abbreviation of the title is expanded near the end of the lyrics "nature intended the abstract for you and me". The narrator is in heavy delusion and will never admit that she is the one who has failed by not moving on, for all her superior musings. A slow few chord wave pattern washes to and fro swinging thick regret.

Music for Evenings, more spiky guitar and bass but an even more muted vocal repeating in a tiny melodic phrase a series of bleak statements about someone she doesn't want. Then, as so often on this album the song just ends with a chunky bass note. And we're back in the dark.

The Young Marble Giants made one album and a few 45s and then disbanded, forming other bands like Weekend and the Gist. A trio from Wales they were the two Moxham brothers and Alison Statton on vocals. Their style and approach to arrangement and recording owed much to a wide musical field but one left severely picked and scratched after they had take what they liked. The result was a bare minimum you would struggle to call rock for all its staccato guitars and white boy picked bass and Statton's hypnotised vocals. The only things like this music were created afterwards. The XX come immediately to mind but they are at the end of a decades long line of imitators. So why did this no-hit tripack have any sway at all let alone the rich legacy they left?

Look at the cover art I put at the start of this post. Between the quirky characters of the band name and the italicised sanserif font of the album title there are three faces in stark half light. The boys all high cheekbones and dimples bookend Statton whose pout is not that of a model but a victim. There is defiance here. Not the camera-flash-long defiance of a hair metal band but something with a quiet strength from knowing the value of restraint in a show of force. The quiet laments of the vanquished call here through a darkness they no longer fear. In a very sobering sense this album is about freedom.

I had an incomplete taping of this album when it was new and never sought it out as vinyl but the Young Marble Giants were my standard for the real alternative rock music. As sparsely arranged as anything by the early Go Betweens or even Gang of Four the Young Marble Giants were both more melodic and emotive than those combined. The politics is there in songs like the title track or Include Me Out but most of it is fought on the personal battleground. While the arrangements are kept to a minimum which is never violated it feels effortless rather than dictated by manifesto. I loved them for this.

Years later after my move to Melbourne I fell into an emotional depression (I won't insult the sufferers of clinical depression by pretending mine was clinical, though I have previously) which began as a lament that I was too slow making friends and led to a withdrawal from situations where I might fix this or strengthen any contacts I'd already established. It was a vile circle of bleakness, worse for my own compliance in it. I crawled out of it  with the help of one friend in particular and joining a writing group in Carlton. Simple remedies, no prescriptions. But until that happened months later I carried through the downer of my final year in Brisbane and set my weekends up for sole music appreciation in the dark.

I led with either Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures or Colossal Youth. The former for when the self pity stung like tragedy and the latter for when some hope was required as a starter. I lay on the couch in the North Melbourne house and listened to the light white horse clops of Searching for Mr Right advance into the gloom.

And I'd fancy I was strong. I lifted myself into control of the books I wanted to write and I'd fashion conferences of mass cultural effect. These were held in cities of glass and light to which I would bring the voice of the lonely and the dispossessed. I stood, borne of this chugging engine of sound, on the peaks of mountains and, coming upon the chasms between them, saw the multitudes of the victims of all life. And into massive canyons made of such tiny breaths I would call the way to the light.

"Going to start a brand new life

Fashioned out of brand new strife

But when I hear the door bell ring

I can never let them in

To meeeeeee."