We last featured Seattle’s Tucker Theodore back in the summer of 2017, when we unveiled his album Lady Hope, a masterful fusion of outsider folk and droning noise. Lady Hope is “difficult to categorise,” we said, “its blown-out lo-fi aesthetic transforming what in another life were folk songs into something with a strange weight and power. It’s music constructed from the base elements, big and powerful and oddly foreboding.”
Now Tucker Theodore is back with a new album, LSG, a collection of ten “movements” organised into two 25 minute tracks. The record sees Theodore continue to push the boundaries of what he can do with his music, ranging from lonely lo-fi guitar to pummelling post-rock. As label Antiquated Future Records describe, “it’s wild and unruly and impossible to put in any box.”
LSG is its own world, segueing from shimmering crystalline electronic effects and moments of ethereal grace, to muscular and mean rock songs. The first track, ‘Movements 1-6’ gathers from a swirling murk, secluded guitar winding across a landscape of distorted drums and otherworldly atmospherics. The rest of the movements ebb and flow in tidal tempo—at times relatively calm and enveloping, and others roaring with nature’s full fury—but infused with a kind of patient, elemental rhythm regardless.
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‘Movements 7-10’ begins with just over seven minutes of elegiac guitar and burbling effects. Ruminative, repetitive and truly affecting, the song is a great example of the quieter moments on LSG. Perhaps even more illustrative is the transition into the next movement, which is equally affecting but in a different way, sky-wide guitar slashing across a dark landscape like cracks of electric light. The effortless move from intimate and insular to wide-screen epic somehow works perfectly, a feat that Tucker Theodore repeats across LSG as a whole. It’s brave and bold and quite unlike anything else you’ll hear this year.
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LSG is out now and you can get it via Antiquated Future Records.