Ryan Lott, the dexterous architect behind Son Lux, is well-versed in a startling array of genres. One look at his credits – including orchestration and instrument design for the movie Looper and work with S / S / S, a collaborative side project alongside Sufjan Stevens and rapper Serengeti – and it’s obvious that Lott not only has tremendous musicianship and technical skill, but also a bottomless curiosity. He’s a tinkerer, and his darkly ambitious sound has been on the radar since 2008, when NPR dubbed him “Best New Artist” for his first Son Lux album, At War With Walls and Mazes.
Now, with increased success from his made-in-a-month, sophomore album We Are Rising, Lott has garnered the attention of critics everywhere for Lanterns, which was released on October 29th from Joyful Noise Recordings. Unfortunately, all of the new eyes and ears on his work are in store for inconsistency as much as innovation this time around.
Lanterns is an album of momentary illuminations rather than outright clarity. Its nine tracks are thick with nuanced experimentation, but for each success yielded by Lott’s deft hands, there is also murky byproduct, which, at its worst, verges on irksome. His intentions are admirable – to create new sonic and emotional terrain – and his kitchen-sink approach can be mesmerizing, but with so many disparate concepts vying for dominance in the mix, cohesion suffers, and satisfaction comes in fleeting waves.
The album’s first track is the breathy “Alternate World,” which opens with tremolo-picking on guitar, wavering synth, and wispy voices in the distance. It crescendos softly before giving way to a cleaner offering of Lott’s ready-to-shatter vocals and some light piano accompaniment, a somewhat recurring technique in his songwriting. The beat, then, begins rebuilding itself, flourish by flourish, until the showcase refrain “Make what we believe. / Don’t we / make what we can?” carries the song out. We are immersed now, compelled even, and the arrival of the album’s first single, “Lost It to Trying,” is much welcomed at this point. Stinging low end, whirling synth, and bouts of electronic ambiance establish the mood, but it’s the fluttering flutes and driving percussion that really punctuate the track and highlight the muscular diversity of Lott’s ear. The lyrics are simple, but their repetition and structure make them engaging, specifically in the parallelism of “What will we do now? / We lost it to trying. / We lost it to trying” and “Give in and get out. / We rise in the dying. / We rise in the dying.”
When his hypnotic charm is at its most powerful, as it has been thus far, Lott earns the oft-used descriptor of “post-rock,” in the sincerest and most congratulatory definition of the term. Unfortunately, a number of songs that follow tow the divide between investigation and indulgence, thereby creating an unintentionally antagonistic listening experience. “Ransom” is the first instance of this, with its horror-movie-esque shrills of violin and effect-ridden overdub of Lott’s already unique vocals. “Easy” departs from these kind of frills as the most straightforward track on Lanterns and succeeds, perhaps, because it displays the middle ground of all of Lott’s modes, the safest manner in which all of his frantic ideas may converge. It’s a nice, slight reprieve, and definitely warrants being touted as a single, but it doesn’t do enough to dull the bite of future tracks like “No Crimes,” which is a quick return to piercing violin and overwhelming electronic samples, nor can it answer for the inescapable pinging in the middle of “Enough of Our Machines” (though, in this instance, maybe that’s the point). Thankfully, the closer, “Lanterns Lit,” strips down and wraps up the album in one of the simplest and most organic variations of his generally mystifying style.
As a whole, Lanterns could have benefited from a little more of the restraint featured toward the end, but it’s worth sitting down with from a craft perspective, as I’m sure the NPR crowd will vouch for. So if you’ve got some patience and want something new and something just a bit out there, it’s a fine introduction to an artist who’s as full of potential as he is puzzles. Keep tabs – there’s no telling where Son Lux’s vision will land him next.
Rating: 3/5