This is a review of "Pleasure Time" recorded by Young Professionals. The review was written by Lauren Strain in 2005.

I am a very easily confused person. I hold the Guinness World Record in Stupidity for asking a friend of mine, in a tone of complete seriousness and slight concern, “Tom, what day of the week is Thursday the 25th of October, please?” Therefore, the level of bewilderment currently accruing and simmering away in the vaults of fluff at the back of my brain is slowly but perceptibly rising. A small yet pertinent frown is knitting itself between my eyebrows as the furry, disused funnels of my mind, like desperate tentacles of reason, wrap themselves around the matter of bafflement in hand and attempt to unpick the problem, searching for a sensible answer. My internal dialogue follows a script something similar to this:

“So, Young Professionals used to be The Bilderberg Group, no?”
“No. I mean yes, sorry.”
“And The Bilderberg Group ended and then formed Young Professionals?”
“Yep.”
“Ah. Yes. I remember seeing them at the HiFi Club a bit ago. They were reet good.”
“The Bilderberg Group?”
“No, Young Professionals.”
“Ah right. They ended, you know.”
“The Bilderberg Group?”
“No, Young Professionals.”
“So The Bilderberg Group didn’t end?”
“No, they did.”
“They did?”
“Yes.”
“So they both did?”
“Yes.”
“Right, I see. So now we have neither of them?”
“No.”
“I see.”
“Are you sure?”
“Ye-e-e-s…”

And so it continues, in a manner completely unrelated to music.

‘E111’ is not only something I don’t have and, as a consequence, cannot enter a foreign country, but also one of the most exhilarating opening tracks to any album I’ve heard in many a light year. A celebratory whack of “One, two, three… PHAWOOOAAAAR!” (you can tell they’re enjoying themselves to an intense state of physical exertion already) buckaroos into a rolling, rollicking rumble of bass and jangling guitar which smacks you in the face with a fist labelled ‘Priceless Chord Change’, causing a tingling sensation of numbness and minor pain to shimmy across your cheeks before conking you on the nose with a whopping amount of cowbell love. It’s a big shudder of a track, shivering its way through your bloodstream with a glint in its eye and a sharp ivory tooth poking up from its bottom lip like an alligator rippling through a black lagoon. Then in come the vocals and all that bubbling threat is removed; the track exploding, as it promised, into some joyous chants about being “an Antipodean in the wrong time zone”. So that’s where all those images of exotic creatures were coming from…sometimes I question my thought processes.

After the beep-attacks and blip-bazooka’d itty-bittiness of ‘K2’, Engine Room favourite ‘Nth Degree’ and ‘The Photofit’, ‘Sound of Speed’ slips down into brooding, woozy, Moog-y undertones with sliding, military drumbeats and panning digital waves. A tad ominous in its knowing little illustrations of yuppies yapping on phones – “Deadlines snapping at your heels, time is money; make the deals” – it makes you breathe a wobbly sigh of relief that it’s a Saturday and there’ll be no one waltzing around in kitten heels with an iPod ordering a designer decaffeinated beverage just around the corner; instead, people are warbling like deranged yokels to ‘Boba’, with its choppy vocal backflips and whizzy gymnastics of sound in the background, and the robo-walk of ‘Damaged’ clip-clopping back and forth like a medicated dose of measured madness.

‘Cats!!’, then, after a spurt of soundchecking, bangs and crashes its noisy, protesting way into your ears with increasing rapidity, sounding as though someone grabbed a massive chomp of metal starting handle and wound it violently until their death occurred. Infectious beyond all rational meaning. Unfortunately, I suffer the annoying affliction, for which Lloyd Webber only can be blamed, of my imagination being crammed with visions of Mr. Mistoffeelees running around the Brudenell or somewhere of the like slamming a guitar and yowling. However, I imagine this is just one of those things that I’ll have to learn to live with, much like Ryvita or the electricity bill.

Matt Humphreys, Lewis Sleeman and the Moss pair, then, whether ghostly band members of a former entity leaving a retrospective relic of their time together, or still existing secretly in some air pocket of a parallel universe, perhaps, are squished chock full of pop and oddity which you should make sure to hear.

Young Professionals are dead; long live Young Professionals!