Colin Caulfield found his first audience on YouTube, covering songs by bands he loved. His version of Deerhunter’s “Rainwater Cassette Exchange” led Bradford Cox to call it far better than the original. Young Man, the project he started in Chicago in 2009, was built to end: an EP and three albums about leaving adolescence behind, and Caulfield always saw the third as the last. “Unfair” comes from that one, Beyond Was All Around Me, released by Frenchkiss on 9 April 2013.
The early records were made alone. Ideas of Distance came together in his bedroom in Rogers Park, everything but the piano on the first track. Vol. 1 (2012) brought in a full band and John McEntire of Tortoise as producer. For the finale the five-piece played together in the live room with Nicolas Vernhes, the producer behind records by Deerhunter and Dirty Projectors, who let the band work and stepped in at the crucial moments. Caulfield then went back to New York alone to track his vocals with him, and said the record would have sounded completely different without him. The title is a line from Dick Proenneke, narrating his years alone in Alaska in the documentary Alone in the Wilderness.
“Unfair” is the eighth of eleven songs and runs 4:49. It went out in March as the album’s second single, passed around blogs as a free download in the weeks before release. Stefan Petermann of RP Online described a big mid-tempo song pushed along by an energetic beat and melodramatic piano, with Caulfield’s voice floating over it. Across the album, strings arranged by Ben Talmi had a larger part than on any earlier Young Man record. Justin Cober-Lake of PopMatters gave the album 6 out of 10, glad that Young Man now worked as a real group but impatient with its longer Pink Floyd-style detours, and Consequence of Sound found it repetitive at times but called it his most original work.
As planned, Beyond Was All Around Me closed the project. That spring Caulfield said he was moving to New York with around 20 new songs, and that he didn’t want to force another record. In July 2013, three months after its release, Caulfield joined DIIV, where he still plays.
