Yung: A Youthful Dream review – polite and prettified punk

The fact that Danish band Yung are retreading old ground on their first album is a moot point: guitar rock currently feels like a place where craggy riffs and rasping vocals are reanimated in order to stir up memories of the past. Those are largely positive memories, admittedly, which makes A Youthful Dream an enjoyable record. Sometimes, as on Blanket, it sounds like a prettified version of the pounding pop-punk that used to soundtrack the Tony Hawk video games, while on tracks such as Uncombed Hair and A Morning View, the band seem more melodic and listless in a Lemonheads vein. Mikkel Holm Silkjær’s vulnerable, shaky vocals provide a bit of idiosyncrasy in the album’s more leisurely moments. It’s polite punk: impossible to feel either alarmed or electrified by, but an appealingly ghostly listen nonetheless.