Album Review: LNZNDRF - LNZNDRF

What do you get when you take two members of The National and a multi-instrumentalist from Beirut (the band, not the city) and lock them in a Cincinnati church for two-and-a-half days? Aside from the most incomprehensible and unpronounceable name in the entire musical pantheon, you get eight driving rock tracks, edited down from half-hour jams.

The Devendorf brothers, Bryan (drums) and Scott (bass), are The National’s tight-as-a-fish’s-arse rhythm section. Brooklyn-based trombonist, tuba player, arranger and composer Ben Lanz is best known as a member of Beirut, as well as being a touring member of The National and Sufjan Stevens’ band. When they put their heads together, the results vary from the sublime to the, well, irritating.

The thing is, these songs might not work their charms on you the first, second or even the tenth time you hear them. But it’s worth playing the long game, because it might just be on the 11th occasion you hear the atmospheric rumbling of the monumental ‘Future You’ that suddenly something clicks, and it all makes a strange, blissful sense. The weird, scratchy effects warble in and out of earshot; the trembling guitar notes seem to fly out into the ether; and the drums, always the drums, are at once hypnotising and propelling the song forwards.

The swathes of sound that make up ‘Beneath The Black Sea’ tread a not-so-happy middle ground, somewhere between Joy Division’s gloomy industrial krautrock and the cinematic rock of The War On Drugs, complete with machine gun drum fills and a low-key vocal. The indie funk of ‘Kind Things’ recalls MGMT’s debut, before they decided that adjectives like catchy, melodic and tuneful weren’t for them anymore, while the floaty ‘Mt Storm’ is Pink Floyd with distortion pedals.

On the down-side, the multi-layered drone of ‘Monument’ grates on the senses and the atonal ‘Samarra’ is probably meant to be trance-like, but only served to put this listener into a near-coma of boredom. When they’re bad, they’re pretty forgettable, but when they’re good, they’re electric.

Key Track: ‘Future You’

7/10

Out February 19