Lost Sounds
Black Wave (Empty)
by Jon Sarre
Hey, it’s synth-rock, but before ya go yeech and skim thru to our new high-concept marketing play of runnin’ pics of “hot chicks” in Lollipop tees, it’s synth-rock without some big freakin’ pretension of art that ya normally think of when some asshole mentions Rick Wakeman or that new thing ex-Riot Grrl Kate Hannah did after she learned howta spell (and mebbe speak French). Lost Sounds got a moody sorta dark record here, perfect for these times when the number one tourist attraction in the country is a big hole in lower Manhattan – not even as cool as The Mystery Spot, that’s for sure! The people in Lost Sounds – Memphisians, I think, use the various old synths at their disposal to create buzzes, rotor thuds, noisy plings and plain noise, as well as that funeral-in-a-space-movie sound that ya’ve heard a million times before and that’s mebbe why Jay Reatard’n’Alicia Trout, who do the vox job scream a whole bunch of the time – when it’s Trout, they sound like the Red Aunts on New Wave Cover Band Night; when it’s Reatard, they sound like what I figure the Screamers sounded like (cuz I don’t know what the Screamers sounded like, cuz they never released anything official and the boots are hard to find and I’m still not rich). It’s that mix of that no-wave “make art by pretending to not make art” and “fuck art let’s rock” (with, ya know, “real songs”) aesthetics plus this feeling of being backed into a corner and dealing with the claustrophobia and desperation that makes Lost Sounds somethin’ other than the irony-pushin’ hucksters ya might expect ’em to be if I told ya all this in a “more coherent narrative.” Kinda like, I dunno, Servatron, like mebbe if Devo had been as cool as everyone assumes them to be, but Mark Mothersbaugh does music for films nowadays, so that oughtta tell ya somethin’, ‘specially since I don’t know anyone who sees movies for the score!
(PO Box 12035 Seattle, WA 98102)