You can’t accuse the 23-year-old Guernsey producer Mura Masa of false advertising. Raw Youth Collage, his second album, is bitty and a little raw – notably Deal Wiv It, a persuasive 2019 track in which the punkoid exclamations of slowthai set a tone. Another bouncy track, No Hope Generation, manifests as a string of cliches, however; its punk-lite rush fails to engage.
Like many tracks here, it features the producer born Alex Crossan as vocalist. Mura Masa’s stated aim for the album is how aural nostalgia has become a coping mechanism to ward off the complexities of the present day. As mission statements go, it’s promising.
But Crossan largely abandons the dancefloor nous of his most well-known work for pensive comedowns and electronic indie rock. While the previously released, Clairo-fronted I Don’t Think I Can Do This Again had its charms, Crossan’s collaboration with Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell only really gets going at the end, when it pulls back from four-four boredom and refracts. Despite a couple of nicely turned meditations (the title track, A Meeting at an Oak Tree), Raw Youth Collage mainly transmits a confusion that is less generational than solely Mura Masa’s.
