In reading about the now mythic Young Marble Giants, a Brit band put together at the tail end of the seventies as punk stopped being anything near useful, it’s amusing to see time and again the ensemble referred to as either poppy or progenitors of post-punk.

That first concept – the band being poppy – is most likely derived from the fact that YMG’s singer, Alison Statton, possessed a high pitched, pleasant voiced which would have been well suited for sixties’ styled bubblegum work outs. Oddly contrasted with the sparseness of the band’s music, Statton, whose voice is placed high in the mix, floats above what could be understood as minimal music.

Using just a guitar, bass, synth and tape loops of drum patters on occasion, YMGs weren’t engaged in the pursuit of pure pop synthesis. Synthetic, yes, but the band’s orientation in relationship to popular sounds is one removed from the norm. While more readily digestible than most punk stuff floating around at the end of its first wave, YMG still weren’t anywhere near the new wave stuff, some of which surprisingly made us of similar instrumentation.

Figuring the band as post-punk presents a wealth of troubles. Firstly, the genre itself doesn’t have a definitive sound and is seemingly based on the concept of time – if you’re band cropped up after 1977,  there’s a good chance that someone’s referred to ya’ll as post-punk. The signifier, though, when understood in context most frequently means group’s like Wire, the Mekons or Gang of Four, none of which share commonalities with YMG. If there was to be an obtuse relation made, it might be that each of those post-punk group’s made use of rhythm sections indebted to Jamaican music. YMG, on occasion, could have been said to use the same concepts to sure up it’s bottom end, which most frequently didn’t count any sort of percussion, inauthentic or not.

Whatever the band was, it was able to craft some enduring music – Nirvana, Hole and the entire Northwest cohort were fans. Tracks like “The Man Amplifier,” twee as all get out, might seem to be too fey for those gnarly northerners to embrace. But the simplicity inherent in YMG’s music was easily transferable to unadorned rock and roll music as it was recast during the late eighties and early nineties.

With YMG’s catalog being reissued a few years back, there was a surge in interest. But with band members taking care of normal life stuff, recording and extensive touring don’t look to be on the horizon.