Lack The Low – One Eye Closed (2018)

It’s not often in this world that you are thrown an opportunity to review your boss’ spouse, even if “boss” and “review” are only the loosest approximations of the terms in this case. In this respect, penning some words about Lack The Low’s debut album felt like a great honour, wrapped around a tiny kernel of danger regarding my future employment status. Did I deal with the self-induced pressure well? Did I fuck:

As a preliminary precaution, I took my advance copy of “One Eye Closed” to a place where I knew no one would try and bootleg it (Cuba) and listened to it on repeat while lying on a remote beach. This isn’t normal procedure for me, but it certainly helped to clear my mind of distractions. I was like a ruminant; a sunburnt, hirsuite ruminant.

After that, agonising over the form and content of this review, I wrote and rewrote it many times, ranging in tone from the sycophantic coos of a brown-noser to the throbbing scorn of a wronged employee. None survived a reread. Incidentally, while all different, each version contained a reference to Charles & Eddie’s “Duophonic”. No, me neither.

Then I figured that I could kiss my job goodbye if I didn’t point out the refreshingly oxymoronic nature of Lack The Low’s music. So I considered writing something about it being dark but poppy; about it being festooned with layers of instrumentation, but managing to feel stark when it needs to. I also considered writing something about it being angry, but the delicate anger of a kitten who’s cornered a newt and doesn’t know how to kill it without touching its vile corpusculent skin. And being at the same time joyful, but the dark joy of a future hedge fund manager burning high value banknotes with mummy’s diamond-studded magnifying glass.

However, I felt conflicted about whether these trite allegories would sit well with top brass, and they stayed neither written nor un-written, in a state of limbo (or non-limbo, depending on your perspective).

In the end, though, the intensity of it all was too much for me: failing to give this album the pithy testament it deserved was the final straw. It felt to me like trying to summarise a geological time period, and suddenly I knew that the review would never be written. I got up from my sunbleached towel, waded into the sea, and floated away.

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