Impressive and scary in equal measure.

It’s big scary electronica from Lorn, a 23 year old from Illinois and heading up the darker electronic dance scene in America at the moment, which apart from that doesn’t give out a massive amount of information about him so he’s pretty illusive much like his music. Listening to his debut album ‘Nothing Else’, at times is like one of those face huggers in ‘Aliens’, scarily suffocating but intoxicating too, mixed with the head imploding energy of those massive spiders in ‘Cloverfield’, particularly on the short sharp shock of ‘Grandfather.’
‘None of An Island’ is a big beatgasm of tense synths mixed up with imploding underwater and submerged drum beats. It is like Massive Attack being eaten by a massive robot – and well being attacked massively.
‘Army Of Fear’ pretty much does what it says on the tin, by sounding like a mutant version of Destiny’s Child with some robotic army salsa beats ploughed into the middle of parping organs.
Lorn’s album ‘Nothing Else’ is only 33 minutes long too so you don’t have time to get bored but its is enough time to brutalise and savage your brain. There’s some uncompromising stuff on here.
Then we enter into ‘Void 1 and 2’, which is like trying to force sharp arrows to pop from your brain and through your forehead like a manic android version of Robin Hood.
However Lorn eases up on the frazzling synths and sinisterness for the ever so slightly more subtle, but more complex and dreamy future pop of ‘Glass and Silver.’ Whereas the after midnight styling’s of ‘Cherry Moon’ seems to have sucked in to the whole vampire craze at the moment touching on the likes of Royksopp with its broken synths - albeit with it being recorded in a cold storage/ weapons bunker and all sorts of unidentified (musical) creatures are being discovered in wonderment.
In fact it’s the 2 aforementioned tracks that show Lorn to be capable of something far more interesting and deeper. And then ‘Greatest Silence’ merges the big scary electro of the first half of the album with the expansive elements of the previous 2 tracks whilst again taking killer swipes at your brain.
The first half of the album might be impressively scary but it’s the last few tracks that hint at something better and more impressive, maybe that way Lorn can really deliver us a scarily impressive knockout blow.

Ben Bradford

For fans of Flying Lotus, Aphex Twin, Massive Attack. www.myspace.com/lornnn