On the record: The Lasso – 2121
This year has thrown up its first tremendous experimental album. The Lasso’s new record, 2121, is cram-packed with diverse sounds, clear influences, and music worthy of repeated returns. It is the most exciting album I can remember listening to for a long time.
To excavate 2121 fully will take dozens of listens. The album features an electric mix of collaborations from Future Islands lead singer Samuel Herring, Nashville rapper Namir Blade and Chicago vocalist A. Billi Free. All of whom are marshalled by The Lasso amid some ambitious composing.
The Abyss, midway through the album, begins as a pretty standard hip-hop track. Drum machine kicking, Fat Tony raps about justice and a need for change. Then, a bass guitar joins in, oozing funk. The song complicates things further with dreamy vocals echoing over the beat. And when it gets to Fat Tony’s second verse, the song accelerates beyond a simple rap track; you’re listening to something altogether more futuristic. The Houston rapper’s vocals are altered, just slightly, and you skip forward a few decades. Gradually you’ve been taken on a journey from 80s style hip-hop through to music at the very vanguard of modern hip-hop.
The third track on the album Will We Be Us Again? features a rapped verse and understated sung performance from Hemlock Ernst (the hip-hop performing name for Future Island’s Samuel Herring) with saxophones high in the mix.
The sci-fi theme is woven throughout the album, lyrically and in its production. This is a futuristic house party, existing on an astral plane. 2121‘s influences and sounds give the album the feeling of being akin to a musical version of the bookshelf sequence in Nolan’s Interstellar. It’s the past, present and future all at once.
The Lasso credits this album’s influences as Arthur C. Clarke, Motor City Funk, Van Dyke Parks, modern funk and art-rap. If that sounds confusing, it isn’t. The album feels coherent despite the disparate elements that have been fused together, Somehow the album features cellos and saxophones, an orchestra, Moogs and mellotrons. Rappers and sung vocals, some affected and altered, some not. And yet the album doesn’t sound “odd” at all.
The Lasso and his collaborators deliver on the concept; 2121 is one hundred years in the future. If this is the sound of music to come, it’s time to find a time machine or cryogenically freeze yourself. 2121 is a keeper.