M Larsen-Bakk - Sorted

 

Released: September 16

From the very first few seconds of Sorted, I was intrigued and confused. I was basically compelled by my own weird curiosity to hear all of the album and still didn’t really know anything further by the end. But I can, at the very least, say that I was captivated for the entire album. Briefly explained, the album appears to be rather atonal as a whole (with the possible exception of the final track, which we will get into later) and almost entirely “vocal.” But when I say vocal, don’t think that this is just a collection of acapellas. I mean, it kind of is that but on dissociative drugs. The first track “RIP-FTW Sort Life Gets Sorted” appears to utilize a vocals only rap verse but it’s so glitched out and keeps jumping so randomly and quickly that it is impossible to understand what is being said. 

Most of the album follows this same theme, but makes the weirdest variations of strangely diverse source material. The second track appears to use some kind of old country folk song sang acapella and the third is pretty much completely indecipherable as to what its origins are. Things got quite interesting when it finally came to “Son of True Love’s Hair Starring Revenge of Sequel Patty Jo.” Torn from some odd piece of audio, we get some odd humming interspersed with errant screams and glitching tones. But this hint of tonality is only a teaser for the final track with thirteen minutes of ghostly vocalizations and tones. It still possesses all of the glitchy idiosyncrasies of the rest of the album, but it feels a bit more like a very messed up opera, one in which the actors are all tortured spirits using a broken auto-tune module that can’t quite keep itself in key. It’s a very surreal experience. And while I’m not entirely sure what Larsen-Bakk was conveying, I do know that I was quite captivated by it.