The Daily Spin, September 12
Lorn | REMNANT
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
Album: REMNANT (2018)
Artist: Lorn
Link:
Icy like a mid-aughts mean girl, Lorn’s dubstep-adjacent electronica towered over his contemporaries in the early and mid-2010s, a figurehead for the darker side of sound - and yet, REMNANT tries to become something of a bridge between his earlier work and modern electronic music.
Lorn crossed my radar for his work on the soundtrack for the video game Furi - full of synthwave and pulsing with electronic beats, it’s a tightly wound score, each song representative of a boss or a geographic area within the game - and though there were artists like Carpenter Brut, whose wailing guitars call forth all sorts of 80s tints; Danger, who takes a sparkling sort of energy to his work, all the push and vigor of a particularly taxing day at the gym; and Scattle, best known for his work on Hotline Miami, all the pastel glow and the seedy underbelly in one glorious cue - but it was Lorn that stood out to me, music designed to creep through, unassuming until it is deeply uneasy, the sort of creeping grit that you’ll miss unless you’re actively looking for it.
That unease is his greatest strength - through an impossibly tight technical process and a particular taste for viciously punchy bass, albums like 2015’s VESSEL or 2017’s A/D, Music For Picture stood out above a lot of hangers-on - because sure, anyone can make dark and angry music, but few artists so brilliantly call forth rage so hot it runs cold in your blood like Lorn does.
We cannot live with anger dominating our existence, but every once in a while, it feels so goddamn good to just get mad. This is the album for that.
Rating: 8.5/10
Best Tracks: SILHOUETTE; PAWO; DRAWN OUT LIKE AN ACHE
Worst Tracks: L’APPEL DU VIDE