Good Effort!

"A biting yet hopeful commentary of the everyday travails of living in a modern city" - Clash Magazine Italo Calvino once remarked that his acclaimed novel Invisible Cities was “structured like a polyhedron, and has conclusions everywhere, written along all its edges.” In a similar vein, Youniss’s latest record Good Effort! is a kaleidoscope that scatters the experience of urban life into a sonic fractal streaked with the colors of jazz, post-punk, and experimental hip hop. Yet while Calvino’s meandering accounts of fictional cities had more to say about abstract concepts girding the human experience, Good Effort! is an open-ended narrative around the everyday, concrete travails of living in a city. “Living in a city is very different from just being in that city,” he says. Good Effort! tells of the gap between living and being, a biting critique forged out of the belief that something better is possible.