Labels: Gern Blandsten
Review by: Andy Malcolm
Erm, if you didn’t like the Van Pelt you won’t like this either. But if you loved the Van Pelt, as you should, then you’ll like the Lapse also. Chris Leo is again on talking duties, although sometimes we get some female vocals courtesy of Toko Yasuda, and this helps mix things up and helps it sound different to the last Van Pelt album.
Basically this is the same sort of thing. The awesome, yet slightly uncategorisable indie/emo/occasionally-acoustic guitar sound that the Van Pelt had, with Chris Leo doing that strange, sing-songy talking bit over the top. It’s quite bizarre, and you really have to hear it to get the full picture.
The first side sees the Lapse rock it up a little more than VP did on ‘Sultans of Sentiment’, particularly on opener “The Betrayal” and “Infinite Me”. They do slow it down though on the likes of “The Threat”, with its wonderful glockenspiel type sound. Toko gets more singing on the second side, adding a more dreamy nature to the Lapse’s work on “Mentabolism”, and “Consent” – a drifty sort of trip-hoppy number. Woah, potential top 40 single alert! Heh. Probably not. Then there is Chris putting across pop kiddo Billie’s ‘Because I Want To’ idea with just a little more thought and justification in “From Destructive Urges Reason Emerges”, and the master stroke of the spell bindingly beautiful sound of “This Is Not The Pure Aesthetic”, very Rainer Maria. The words don’t quite fit the music mind.
Lyrically they are a bit amazing. Ranging from the odd, almost essay like discussion of sexual psychology on “Hide Your Daughters”, to stuff like “We Must Move Backwards To Progress”, and I promise this in an actual line: “To the primordial dusk anthropologists! Anthropomorphize these single cells”. Way! We’re not exactly talking pop punk here. They have a number of themes going in a couple of these songs too, I think the song “The Threat” is about knowing you’re going to die one day and it brings up this idea of a “Pure Aesthetic” which also crops up in two other songs – I’m not sure enough of what it’s getting at to comment on it here, but hopefully one day….Crumbs, this stuff is way deep, you could spend an age just pouring over the lyrics with the music on in the background. Oh, I just noticed another one, “People Wouldn’t Shoot Up If It Didn’t Feel Good”, ouch – ‘I hate people because the compromise I would have to make to like them, I believe would cause me more pain than the loneliness and disgust that is at times all consuming’. Man.
What we have here is Genius, people. Check out the Lapse, they fit into this category: different.