Youth of today

COME CLEAN Young People hit a high-water mark on their new album.

In the summer of 2003, the three members of Young People relocated their two-year-old group from Los Angeles to New York City. It’s the kind of move that draws bands closer together. By the middle of the following year, though, after releasing their second album, War Prayers, and touring steadily, guitarist Jeff Rosenberg and percussionist Jarrett Silberman decided to return to L.A. (while staying in Young People). Remaining in NYC was singer-pianist Katie Eastburn, who was feeling at home in Greenpoint, and was also pursuing projects as a dancer, choreographer and teacher. Soon after, Rosenberg left the group altogether to go back to school. This is the kind of upheaval that shatters bands.

But Eastburn and Silberman hardly blinked at their 3,000-mile obstacle. “There was no real strategizing,” Eastburn says over bourbon in Soho. “We had already talked about making our third album differently; in the past, we’d record only what we could play in the same room at the same time, but we wanted to be open to overdubs and things like that.” For Silberman, the separation was a catalyst. “We had space to sort out our own parts,” he says by phone from L.A., “instead of standing together while someone said, ‘Hold on while I figure this out.’”

The new setup, in which songs were built from ideas Silberman, 31, and Eastburn, 29, exchanged via mail, prompted their best work: the remarkable new All at Once, on which Eastburn’s arcing voice cuts through bracingly spare and mercurial arrangements of guitar, piano and drums. After dozens of listens, the album remains fresh and unpredictable. While Young People’s sound could be loosely categorized as underground rock, Eastburn, whose lyrics bleed from entreaties into plaints and invocations, might as well be singing show tunes or gospel music (her first vocal experience did come in church, and Young People covered the Rev. Gary Davis on their first record). Musicologists would be particularly flummoxed by “Slow Moving Storm,” which opens with a militaristic drumbeat and the singer asking, or advising, to “kiss all of your trouble behind.” The song crests in showy tension, after which Eastburn can be pictured strutting across a Broadway stage, snapping her fingers while singing, “Angel walk the night / Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mmm.”

Despite its many charms, perhaps the most surprising thing about All at Once is that, in an age of excess, its 11 songs clock in under 28 minutes. “Nobody told us that wasn’t okay,” Eastburn says, smiling. “People pay for a show or record and expect to be entertained for 45 minutes,” Silberman says, “which is way too long. After 30 minutes of anything, I want to get a drink, or talk to someone—I’ve absorbed as much as I can.”

For the indefatigable Eastburn, making the most of her time would seem an imperative. Detailing her history as a performer and instructor could fill this page; she has danced consistently from childhood (hula first, then ballet, modern, jazz and Butoh), and while in college at Brown, her studies went multidisciplinary by incorporating theater. Choreographing prompted her to begin working out soundtrack ideas (she recently curated a unique DVD of dance and music, Starter Set). Eastburn leapt at an opportunity to teach collaborative theater in a Rhode Island women’s prison, an experience that led to teaching projects with teens in San Francisco and Los Angeles. And one of the reasons she moved to NYC was to work with the Vibe Theater Experience, which offers arts training to teenage girls from public schools that lack such programs; under her guidance, a group of Vibe girls made a CD under the name Hot Fire last year, playing much-talked-about shows at Knitting Factory and an outdoor festival in Williamsburg. “One of the things I try to share with the girls is the idea of owning your time,” she says. “That’s what I find most joyful about being a musician and dancer, that time you create and that space you create in. Jarrett and I share an intense feeling of gratitude for what we do—we don’t want to waste anyone’s time.”

All at Once is out Tuesday 21 on Too Pure.