Young Marble Giants, «Colossal Youth» LP, Rough US 6, 1980. Alison Statton - Voice, Philip Moxham - Bass, Stuart Moxham - Guitar & Organ. Songs: Stuart Moxham except 3 songs with Philip Moxham, Alison Statton. Produced and Arranged by Young Marble Giants and Dave Anderson (Engineer)

What an astonishingly beautiful record..! The Young Marble Giants don't really compare, they produced a very unique sound. But if you like music as diverse as the Velvet Underground, PiL, Booker T & The MG's, Mouse on Mars, The Slits, Radiohead and Laurie Anderson – those kind of bands, you'll love this record too.

YMG in Cardiff photo by Andrew Tucker

The album was released in 1980 on Rough Trade Records as the band's debut release. It was an instant hit on the independent scene.
The trio are from Cardiff, Wales, and were together as band for only two years. They created an outstanding collection of stripped-down, marvellously austere music.
A three CD set of their entire material was put out last year in a nice package on Domino Records, including a booklet with photos and an excellent text by Simon Reynolds.

«Crucial to the band's crisp and dry sound was Stuart's Rickenbacker, "a very trebly guitar" which he played using "an extremely hard plectrum, called a shark fin, with a serrated edge." Throughout the YMG songbook, Stuart eschews lead-guitar flourishes and soloistic playing in favour of a signature style of scurrying rhythm guitar, its characteristic choppy quality reliant upon on a technique called "muting", where "you're basically resting the hand that you strum with on the strings." The result was a feel that was dynamic and propulsive yet curiously suppressed,subdued, even furtive. Philip played his bass high, sch that it was frequently mistaken by listeners for another guitar; indeed, with Stuart's playing so intensely rhythmic and stripped-down, the bassline was often the melodic thread in YMG songs. The brothers' instruments wound around each other like fibres twining into yarn. "We became immensely tight," says Stuart. He attributes their supernatural synchrony not just to fraternal closeness but to their use of machine rhythm. Instead of a human drummer, YMG twitched to the precision pulse of a very basic drum machine. "We were playing to what was effectively an electonic metronome", akin to the click-track used by sessions musicians in recording studios.
- Excerpt from Simon Reynolds text in the CD booklet