Keep your scanners peeled for Lorn's Nothing Else

Emerging like a dense ash cloud from the volcanic Brainfeeder label (almost topical!) , Lorn has finally landed his album Nothing Else. The title is a reference to a question raised by John Milton in Paradise Lost, although if this long-player was literature, it would be something much more dystopian - Animal Farm or The Road, maybe.

As soon as the fat, fuzzy synth lines drop in Grandfather, the scene is pretty much set: cloggy beats and loping hip-hop instrumentals that, perhaps, sometimes take themselves a little too seriously such as when the ghostliness edging into pomposity on Army Of Darkness.

Oh but what ghostliness. Eerie, melancholic chords give way to thuddering beat patterns, giving us a soundtrack to a film in which Decker thought 'sod this' and went off to steam his head instead of tracking down replicants.

The sounds are solid, eighties pixels of pleasure too - the masculine, rolled-up suit sleeves of the biting stutter synth in Cherry Moon, for example. If you don't get the odd frisson of Knight Rider excitement, then you should go away and listen to Busta Rhymes' Fire It Up and then work your way up to Lorn.

But it's a modern album on a modern label. The best comparison I can give for this album is Clark's Totems Flare, and not just because it was mastered by the Clarence Park body riddler himself. It has the same boldness and playful fussiness - as well as vocals, which are more unusual than you'd realise on electronic albums like this.

For those that have followed Lorn for the past few months, there is one depressing realisation. There seems to be no Until There Is No End on this album. His epically evil take on r 'n' b was such a ground-shifter last year, I'm puzzled to find it missing. Of course, it's up to Lorn where he sticks his music, but that track's spectre looms over this album.

You see... there wasn't Nothing Else after all.