Young Guv

Think of the contemporary guitar music that’s meant something to you in the last 18-odd years. Ben Cook has probably had something to do with making it or influencing it. Think of No Warning, which he’s fronted since he was in high school in the ’90s, a band that pioneered a self-aware, technically proficient, highly allusive style of New York hardcore that has dominated the subgenre in scenes all over the world for closing in on two decades and counting. Think of Fucked Up, for which he’s played guitar since 2006, the aesthetically omnivorous, thematically ambitious punk-rock-deconstructing semioticians — a band that, unlike the bulk of their contemporaries in the late-2000s festival-circuit indie-rock boom, no one is ashamed of having associated themselves with. Think also of his behind-the-scenes presence — the co-writing and production work he’s done for a host of artists at all levels of renown.

But, for all that, the only place to hear music that belongs entirely to Ben Cook — music that comes into the world owing nothing to a bandmate or a client or a genre convention, whether affectionately observed or cheekily subverted — has been under the umbrella of Young Guv, or Young Governor, or Guv, or whatever he may at the time have been calling the entity that, since 2008, has released a steady drip of singles and EPs, plus two full-lengths. Sometimes Young Guv songs have guitars and British Invasion harmonies; sometimes they have synths and a modulated voice. But always they have choruses you’ll never forget and lyrics whose dry wit and understated acuity knocks you flat.