Like Spencer Krug and Sufjan Stevens, Ryan Lott, who’s helmed the synth-rock project Son Lux for the past decade, is the kind of songwriter who can turn the most intimate moments sweeping and majestic. His albums treat crisp, minuscule detail with cinematic grandeur. Lott, a classically-trained composer, has scored several films, and it’s not hard to imagine any one of Son Lux’s recent songs soundtracking the trailer to an upcoming blockbuster. Brighter Wounds, Son Lux’s fifth LP and second since guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang entered the fold, has loftier ambitions than Lott’s prior work. It’s not the first time Son Lux have kept one eye trained on the state of the world, but it is the first time the stakes have felt quite this high.
“Is this the future standing over me?” Lott asks through muffling vocal effects in the first minute of the opening track, “Forty Screams,” singing darkly of seeds and “sour blooms.” Like many Americans over the past year and a half, he’s had to reckon with his share of responsibility for the condition of the country as it stands. Lott also recently had his first child, whose birth has pointed his wary eye toward the future. “I hear the future voice of my son every day: ‘Why did you let this happen?’,” Lott said in a 2017 interview. If the world is intolerable for Lott (“I can’t bear another day like this,” he repeats on “Forty Screams”), how can he expect his child to become part of it?
Brighter Wounds frames these questions with gorgeous instrumental bursts that lift Lott’s vocals to a desperate breaking point. Acoustic instruments like piano and strings ballast the synthesized chirps, squiggles, and vocal effects that have long detailed Son Lux’s music. Songs often follow predictable structures only to break from them at the last second, turning a false ending into a thrilling coda. There’s a moment toward the end of “Dream State” where a torrent of voices and synthesizers falls away, leaving only Lott against a drum beat, and he breaks into falsetto—not the coy, reticent kind that textures Bon Iver’s music, but a genuine shattered gasp. It sounds as though Lott has been punched in the diaphragm yet still needs to scream. It’s the only time on the album he uses that particular voice, and its deployment helps turn “Dream State” from a standard-issue radio-rock anthem (it makes abundant use of the millennial whoop, not to mention the kind of drums Imagine Dragons might want to steal) to a startling portrait of brokenness and fear.
To survive the present, Lott has to reckon with the past. “I am not my father’s son/I don’t belong to anyone,” he muses over a nervous breakbeat on “Surrounded,” and on “All Directions,” that million-voiced chorus asks, “Weren’t we beautiful once?” Throughout Brighter Wounds, Son Lux resist the idea that each moment is merely the sum total of all the moments preceding it. They do this in a formal sense, pivoting their songs with the grace and melodrama of an Olympic figure skater, and in their lyrics, making a declaration of something you might call faith. On the album’s climactic closing song, “Resurrection,” over towering drum crashes and whirlwinds of strings, Lott sings of the failure of both “silence and protest.” So he scours himself for a third option: something he can’t name yet, but can only begin, with wonder and curiosity and courage, to trace.
