Salami Rose Joe Louis is Captain Beefheart for synth heads who grew up watching Adult Swim. She debuted in a punk band playing the blender (as in the household appliance). She named her first album Son of a Sauce!, her second Zlaty Sauce Nephew. She then followed those, naturally, with a handful of grand sci-fi concept albums.
Before she was Salami Rose Joe Louis, Lindsay Olsen was a scientist studying the ocean’s acidity. During lab breaks, she’d tinker away at the piano, finding alliances between molecular forms and chord sequences. Nowadays, her music might best be described, per one of her song titles, as “giddy aquatic.” Her songs mimic the inky materiality of the sea: Globules of sound bubble in the low end then reach some mirrored surface—melodies ascending, cresting high, then returning.
Olsen composes almost entirely on a charmingly démodé Roland MV-8800 workstation, and her early-digital sound evinces a Stereolab-like talent for repurposing technological kitsch into her own lingua franca: a wave of cartoonish blurps, cheeky voicings, and complex free-form melodies. But the highly ambitious—though ultimately overwrought—sci-fi narratives of her recent releases obscured her talent beneath interdimensional travelogs, talking clouds, and bionic humanoids. On her new album Lorings, she strips back the galactic props and trades cosmological conjecture for inward contemplation. The music is much stronger for it.
Lorings reveals Olsen’s endearing bashfulness, much like the peeking smile she wears on the album’s cover. Her vocals are softly fitful; the songs are never louder than a finch’s call. Olsen’s lyrics, though stuttering, communicate a much clearer insight than before. Here, the songs stand on their own merits, each a calm riot of skill and invention.
Olsen’s spongy, rosy pads make the album feel balmy and mellow upon first blush. But Lorings reveals itself to be far more itchy and restless on further inspection: the product of someone trying to hush an overactive imagination. On “Motorway” and “I dunno ways,” Olsen periodically disrupts precise, slow-moving melodies with experimental gambits. Lounge synths come into collision with free jazz. “That must be hard for you” sounds like the jazz fusion of CASIOPEA if they made music quiet enough not to disturb their roommates.
Lorings is an exquisite balancing act, encapsulating big ideas within small frames. The music possesses a clean fidelity without negating any of its homespun charm. Olsen’s resplendent atmospheres don’t feel panoramic but more like a contained brightness. The staccato chords of “Hobbies” gesture towards the anthemic but stay closed within the tight walls of the song, like moonlight filtering into a shoebox apartment. The album’s sequencing itself is weighted neatly between hecticness and lethargy. Lorings’ first half is a sensory playground. “A sauna sized pill,” the most frenetic among the bunch, is as sprightly as it comes: the sound of a million rubber eggs let loose in a wind tunnel. The backend slows down, all pulse and shimmer. It sets the stage for the most impactful and unburnished lyric on “Wet Log”: “I called my mom and asked/Does this sadness last?”
Lorings makes it obvious not just how talented Olsen is, but how much of a nerd she is, too. She twists pop melodies into tightly wound helixes, making music that sounds both as complicated and instinctive as the electrical frequencies which power her machine. Here is that rare electronic composer capable of perfecting waveforms while able to zoom out, arrange on a macro level, and make a great pop song.
