WU LYF

WU LYF: World Unite! Lucifer Youth Foundation fact file

-album title : go tell fire to the mountain

- genre : none

 - Artists : jeau, lung ,elle jaie , Evanse

- record label : None

 review-

Short for World Unite, Lucifer Youth Foundation, Manchester newcomers WU LYF matched their loftily absurd moniker by recording this debut in a church and refusing to sign to any label, preferring to go it alone.

The results are epic, confounding, but undeniably beautiful. Ellery Roberts’ hoary half-shout bristles against mellow church organ and jangling, Vampire Weekend-ish guitar on We Bros, which is recorded with dreamy, distant echoes reminiscent of early Verve.

Deciphering the lyrics is no mean feat, but his shamanics are more percussive backing than philosophical doctrine, adding to the thickly layered, wilful wanderlust of the melodies and signatures, such as Spitting Blood.

You won’t hear them on Capital Radio – but this record is full of compelling ideas and music well worth digging your teeth into.

The lineup: Jeau, Lung, Elle Jaie and Evanse.

The background: Oh, to be baffled in this digital day and age, when so little is left to the imagination. Even writing about brand new bands you find that, more often than not, everything is spelled out at the first possible opportunity, which makes the joy of discovering something unformed and obscure that much harder. It must be harder still for the bands to retain any mystique or reveal themselves slowly over time. To keep out of the spotlight completely is virtually impossible. All credit to Wu Lyf, then, because even in this overlit environment they are proving difficult to decipher, to get a fix on, which makes us very happy indeed. They're baffling.

They're from Manchester, and they're not signed, we know that, although their gigs have for a while now been attracting a lot of A&R attention. The only photographs we've seen of them show them standing in front of a purple haze of smoke, their faces covered by white handkerchiefs, like they're a terrorist cell or something. In one photo there are six of them, in another there are 10, while their website – theirMySpace is so unfathomable it's literally useless – names four individuals. So far, so confusing.