Beyond Was All Around Me

Surely after Bradford Cox of Deerhunter praised Young Man’s cover of “Rainwater Cassette Exchange”—posted on the Internet a few years ago—that young man (Chicago’s Colin Caulfield) took his first elated steps toward something bigger with abundant confidence. From his first album to this third installment of a proclaimed “finite trilogy,” one hears Caulfield morphing from ambient-flavored bedroom pop to expertly produced band-on-board work, and then into the sophisticated strings and arrangements of Beyond Was All Around Me. “It’s Alright” feels like a mini-epic, with a certain grandeur to the glacial pacing and layers of synths and guitar, even though it’s less than three minutes long and constructed of simple parts. The showtune soul of “Being Alone” works perfectly next to the dirge-inflected “Show Me How”; the sleek “In a Sense” makes the moody “Scrape on the Knee” a bolder tune. Caulfield’s voice is reminiscent of Sea Wolf’s Alex Brown Church. It glints with a glassy and pleasant but strangely restrained patina, and it's impossible not to embrace.