Lake Trout: Another One Lost

Countless bands are already sick of being compared to Radiohead, but just as pop music from the late '60s often bears the stamp of The Beatles, so pop scholars will one day pick bits of Radiohead out of Coldplay, Wilco, Grandaddy, and onward. In the case of Baltimore experimentalist Lake Trout and its new Another One Lost, the Radiohead effect is felt most deeply in the avoidance of conventional sound and song structure–a leap into the unknown not unexpected from a band whose first three records dive from sprawling jazz-funk into thick electronica. But Another One Lost is more of a rock record, and between the heavily filtered sonic beauty and singer-songwriter Woody Ranere's Thom Yorke-like hops from croak to falsetto, Lake Trout falls into its peers' familiar, billowing patterns. And that's a problem, because the futurist, freeform methods that cutting-edge '00s acts revere can be a trap as troublesome as pop traditionalism. Atmospheric clank and whine is often symptomatic of a dogged, paradoxically conservative adherence to cacophony. Lake Trout mostly beats that rap on Another One Lost, in part because time served in the jam scene has taught the group how to move a song along. Its fragmented noise-symphonies transform over the average four-minute length, such that on "Say Something," the pounding and scraping comes together into a moment that sounds almost natural, like the rise and fall of human breathing. The instrumental "Her" starts off like something from Thomas Dolby's The Flat Earth–not coincidentally, the record on which Dolby first tried to emulate synth-pop without using synthesizers. Then, the deep, bubbling bass evolves into a DJ Shadow-like moodscape. "Holding" keeps the Shadow-loops while nodding to '70s prog transcendence; later, "Last Words" pursues discordance, but also finds a delicacy reminiscent of early U2. Lake Trout's gimmick is that it uses live instruments to replicate electronic sounds, and that makes for some unique textures, but the completed tracks aren't always more memorable than the formless art-slop that so many post-rock bands produce. But when Lake Trout modulates that mess, isolates its particulars, and allows it to mutate, Another One Lost becomes not just original, but magisterial.