LOSR.ND - Five Thoughts Passing

 Released: April 10

This album has a peculiar charm about, in a sort of “about nothing” kind of way. The whole premise of the album is that it documents fie random thoughts that passed through the author’s head and then subsequently disappeared. Typically, when you have a random thought, it doesn’t;I register or sit with you all that much since it is, after all, just a random thought. True to the nature of such thoughts, we are given no phonation of what these thoughts contained or expressed, simply that they existed. To tell us bout these random thoughts, a somewhat random assortment of instruments is employed to include a theremin and a couple of other synths recognized for their unpredictability when playing. The results are variable, but certainly embody the ethos of passing thought. 

For much of the first half of the album, things are noisy and even a bit dark. The “First Thought,” as the tracks are so named, is a slight amount of cacophony mixed among some steady bass jolts and a sense of spinning and rolling seems to be embedded in everything except the bass, if that’s even what we can call that. Things only start to lighten up a bit by the fourth track, or “Thought,” with this incredibly elastic feeling track. It gives the sensation that the room around you is expanding and shrinking disproportionately, creating space that would make the Euclidean-trained brain melt and turn to mush. As the final tech comes along, it feels like this almost unexpected bright spot in comparison to the rest of the album. The synth swooshes ad sweeps feel hypnotizing and wonderful as they are slowly joined by a bright drone that carries everything upwards with it. 

Five Thoughts Passing is naturally a rather random-sounding album. But the seemingly random elements are tied together in intricate ways that make it feel coherent despite the iffy question of whether a random thought is really coherent. They are often not, but they are quite fun and unexpected, much like the album.