Review: Young Love's Too Young To Fight it

I was pretty darn thrilled to find Young Love’s new cd, Too Young To Fight It, in my mailbox a couple of weeks ago. Upon receiving the album, I immediately went to my room, popped it in the cd player and turned up the volume. Out blasted ‘Discotech’ and I couldn’t help but get up and dance. Dan Keyes-style around the room (if you haven’t seem the lead singer of Young Love’s moves, then you are missing out, he revolutionized my repetoire). I had been listening to the free EP I received at a Young Love show for ages and to have my hands finally on the album made me a bit giddy. That is until I heard the rest of the songs.

The EP sampler I nearly wore a hole in included singles ‘Discotech’ and ‘Find a new way,’ both great, poppy, dance tracks that defy anybody to not love them for their instant likeability (when I am looking for a song to pump me up before I go out, those have recently been the first two I play). Surprisingly though, for the most part, the rest of Too Young to Fight is very emo, on par with My Chemical Romance or the slower songs of Blink 182. Emo is certainly a genre which I have no grudges against, but if you aim to make a dance record and sell your first two singles as such, having the rest of the album constantly repeat the theme of a heart broken by a narcissistic girl in an unoriginal “I should be wearing black eyeliner” manner, then it is bit misleading. I was similarly duped by Shiny Toy Guns last year with the song ‘Le Disko’ off of their skater/ Evanescence-like album, We Are Pilots.


There are a couple of additional tracks that make this album a worthwhile purchase for the New Year. ‘Too young to fight it’ is another upbeat dance song as is similarly, ‘Underneath the Night Sky.’ What all of these songs have in common is that they superbly paint an idealized, sweeping picture of going out in New York City. They are songs that give you hope of a night dancing, drinking, making out and roaming the streets of a city that never sleeps- the sort of nights you watch attractive 20 year olds have in movies. The tracks scream of being written by an idealistic young man whose good looks and talent have swept him into NYC, providing him the sort of story book city life that many young people coming to the city only dream of. You may find the string of clichés, well, cliché, such as in the chorus to ‘Discotech’ “Do what you believe, stand up break free bright lights big city”, but even so, you are able to forgive all of that with one look at the handsome young man who dresses like a model and dances like how you only wish you could.