While one relies on live musicians and the other on loops and samples, they keep finding common ground. Younger Brother, which performed at Terminal 5 on Thursday night, is a jam-trance alliance that encompasses introspection as well as head-bobbing beats.
On its two albums, A Flock of Bleeps from 2003 and The Last Days of Gravity from 2007 (both on Twisted), Younger Brother is a duo of British dance-music producers, Simon Posford (a k a Shpongle) and Benji Vaughan (a k a Prometheus). Its recordings layer samples, loops and instruments into pulsating dance tracks, sometimes topped by quasi-Middle Eastern melodic lines. The second album also features a handful of more stately songs with high, wispy lead vocals by Ruu Campbell, who has stayed with Younger Brother.
Onstage Younger Brother has added three musicians from jam bands that often use dance-club beats Marc Brownstein from the Disco Biscuits on bass, Joe Russo from the Benevento-Russo Duo on drums, and Tommy Hamilton from Brothers Past on guitar who have also been recording new material with Younger Brother. The show at Terminal 5 was partly a test run for songs from the next album, due in 2010, that sound more like band efforts than programmed dance tracks.
Replacing machines with human muscle has hurled Younger Brother backward along rocks timeline, toward the post-psychedelic early 1970s. The pumping electronic vamp of I Am a Freak, from 2007, was turned into a rock stomp, slightly reminiscent of Edgar Winter Groups 1973 hit Frankenstein, as Mr. Hamilton moved its central riff onto guitar and Mr. Russo brought improvisational salvos to the beat.
Meanwhile Younger Brothers slower songs, like Ribbon on a Branch and the new Spinning Into Place, looked directly back to Pink Floyd. They are marchlike tunes full of keyboard sounds that ping and reverberate, echoey guitar chords and glumly yearning lyrics:
See the lights grow dim
Hope youll find Im still the same
As the boy laughing in the rain.
