Son Lux's debut, At War With Walls & Mazes, resembles the classical concerto. Electronic composer and Son Lux leader Ryan Lott is the soloist, with gentle, sparse vocals, against a backdrop of classical instruments. Occasionally a single organic sound rises behind Lott's utterances, like the bass guitar peeling away from the timberline drum creaks and overlapping whispers on "Raise". These are rarities; for the lion's share of the album's 45 minutes the mood is severe. Son Lux perches over a digital wilderness-- a wilderness of recreated crowd noise, cracked samples, and mutated loops. Laid out as a narrative (beginning with "Prologue" and tidying up with "Epilogue"), with sharp, direct titles ("Wither", "Stand", "War"), has a coarseness, a fatalism, between Lott and the landscapes he creates. It's a heaviness of heart relieved only when those interceding instruments (cello on "Stay", the supple, measured piano on "Break") twine with the vocals against the molded chaos.