Lackthereof
Your Anchor
Barsuk
By Jose Fritz
In Lackthereof, Danny Seim celebrates the most ethereal parts of his own sound. Songs like “Doomed Elephants” and “Locked Upstairs” engage us with slow-core beats and the most brief simple fills under layers of overdubbed vocals. Hericletus wrote that in changing, we find purpose. Seim found that there was more to him than just Menomena.
In 2004, the Portland-based label FILMguerrero released his album Christian the Christian. This is supposedly still in print but I don’t have it so the end result is the same. The snippets I’ve found sound like an entirely different, darker act. Its sounds are harsher, more electronic and raw.
Seim is the drummer for Menomena, and he recorded and produced the record like a drummer. Despite the abandonment of the quadraphonic system, the positioning of mic and recording levels present an impression of a position in the room with the band. Almost every record puts the listener in the from row center. Drummers mix to the rear, which is their point of view. You’re sitting on the drum throne. You can hear the sound of sticks on skins, not just the dull boom and thud. The stacks face away from you, and subsequently you can hear the texture of the strings as loudly as their amplified processed sounds.
His style of drumming seems intact, as well. His rhythms are still broken into root components and presented in parts and pieces to build tension and all at once to deliver release. He can approach a sparse song with even greater minimalism than the rest of Menomena. Every song is as much about the gaps, lulls, and voids as the peaks, sustain, and downbeats.
The album closes with a cover of the National's “Fake Empire” a song they only released in 2007, a version that is eminently more listenable than the original. But that’s not his point. There is something contemporary to the meaningful moment in its lyrics, particularly the line “We’re half-awake in a fake empire.” He sings it with the same melancholy delivery as the opening song on the record, “Chest Pass.” He repeats the words “the new year is the old year, again.”
I don’t think I’ve ever contemplated a record for so long. This is the 9th album by Seim under the Lackthereof moniker. I don’t have the advantage of having heard any of the first eight, as they were only burned to CD-R and given to his friends. So despite the fact that he’s been recording as Lackthereof since 1998, I leap into this directly from Menomena. It’s a gap, a glaring blind spot, but I have to just accept that at least I know what I don’t know in light of his discography, or lack there of.
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