Lazer Sword
Memory
L.A./Berlin
(Monkeytown Records)
“Layered with dark atmospheres and trip-hop beats”
Memory plays through like a late night acid trip that keeps you guessing if what you hear is real or imagined. This is the music heard when the club becomes foggy and the patrons become sweaty wraiths of their former selves, mind on nothing but the beat. Snippets of singing and shouting appear often, usually heavily affected and layered with dark atmospheres and trip-hop beats.
The effect of voices repeating and bleeding through the textures and beats is a pleasurable disorientation. Heads spin and hips swirl around bits of sampled sounds that rise and fall like gusts of wind. Each song finds ways to be inventive and fresh while maintaining the mood of the album, flowing from glitches to deep house smoothly with songs like “Better From U,” which uses low, toned drums to great effect, playing an underwater melody while driving a deep groove home. Lazer Sword wants the crowd to dance until they can’t remember how or when they began, and Memory runs hand in hand with amnesia.
Produced by Antaeus Roy and Bryant Rutledge