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Album Review
by SashaS
6-10-2001
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| 'What Sound' |
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Lamb: 'What Sound'
(Mercury/Universal)
Lamb have produced another album of universal beauty and spatial fatalism
“Pop music is like cheap hamburger: mass marketed and manufactured to appeal to as many people as possible. I am a fringe kind of person. I don’t have the patience to sift through the mainstream, so I tend to go my own way,” the performance artist-cum-musician Laurie Anderson wrote recently. We second this emotion.
And embrace albums like Lamb’s ‘What Sound’ because it hovers between mainstream and avant-garde, it is pop sensible without giving up on intelligence, experimental sans being patronizing. For seven years Louise Rhodes and Andy Barlow have clashed their aesthetics to create works of sonic art and ‘What Sound’ continues the trend with a certain twist.
The head-on collision of technology and soulless-ness has been melted and sculpted into a brand new whole where otherness walks hand-in-hand with humankind. After touring ‘Fear Of Fours’ in 1999 the two principal members hit an impasse and decided to split which freed them to discard the past, grab a carte blanche and “Lamb was reborn”, Barlow comments.
The division that existed between the two has apparently diminished: Barlow, a cyber-freak with interest in all machine-generated sounds has opened his mind and accepted that human element – traditional instruments as well as guests, Jimi Goodwin (of Doves), Me’Shell NdegeOcello and Arto Lindsey among others – is advantageous, while Louise understood that Andy’s world was just the ticket to redress the alienating demands of modern living.
The new expanse is reached on ‘Sweet’ with such a huge bass-line to shake your fillings. It pulsates with urge to get you on your feet and twirl in your living space. There are a lot of tranquil moments, ‘Gabriel’ (about a big love for another human being, based on Islamic poet Rumi’s writing) or ‘Just Is’ (post-Zen meditative retreat’s ‘fatalism-regained’).
The Asiatic-feel of ‘Sweet’ lingers through ‘One’, while serenity can be found in ‘This Could Be Heaven’ or ‘Small’ to have a re-confirmation that minimalism is magnetic. ‘What Sound’ is subtle, exciting, gentle, surprising, gorgeous beyond prose, music on the fringe that peels its layers with every new spin.
The Lamb’s third time… brilliant.
8.6/10
SashaS
14-5-2002
Lamb's 'What Sound' is released 08 October 2001 on Mercury/Universal
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