It’s almost misleading to say that Bones is the first full-band Son Lux album. Ryan Lott—the film- and dance-score composer, former ad-music man, and mastermind of Son Lux since the 2008 release of At War with Walls & Mazes—has never been one to go it alone. He’s a constant collaborator, whether it be with Lorde, Boots, Shara Worden of My Brighest Diamond, or teaming up with Sufjan Stevens and rapper Serengeti for Sisyphus. To tour the material from Son Lux’s previous full-length, Lanterns, Lott put together a three-piece band that included guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang, and the trio parlayed their onstage chemistry into recording sessions for Bones.
Becoming a real-deal band hasn’t radically changed Son Lux. Lott’s vocals are still unmistakeable in their brittle breathiness, and the songs still come across like the multi-layered electronic manifestations of a classically trained pianist who studied composition in college but can’t suppress his inner beatmaker. But the collaboration with Bhatia and Chang—not to mention vocal contributions from Moses Sumney, DM Stith, Hanna Benn, Holychild’s Liz Nistico, Daughter’s Elena Tonra and others—perceptibly aerates the Son Lux sound. Lott has a tendency to pile his influences in a way that can sometimes feel suffocating, like confetti crammed into a party popper, and on Bones, his bandmates pulled the string while also adding their own crinkled strips of color to the explosion. It’s not unlike the way Dirty Projectors are unmistakably Dave Longstreth’s project, but his talented bandmates are crucial to presenting his vision.
It tends to be the words that trip up Lott. He rarely writes traditionally structured songs, and he tends to go the mantra route with the words, to varying degrees of success. On Bones, though, the questions he poses have never been more pertinent. “Are we now what we’ll be? Are we fixed or free?” he asks on “Flight.” Bones is obsessed with exploring whether we can change our station and how or when to sound the alarm. There’s an undercurrent of class warfare and oppression, but Bones is not a protest album. These aren’t Occupy anthems or the soundtrack to protests in Ferguson or Charleston. Lott isn’t railing against a specific tragedy. It’s more general, and it can apply to your issue of choice. Lott merely realizes that it’s time to start railing.
Bones soundtracks those moments or days or months or years when it feels like something isn’t right, and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep it all at arm’s length. Even for someone whom Lott calls “the most fortunate one,” it’s hard to stare at injustice, abuse, oppression, or just plain-old apathy and not be stirred to action—or, rather, stirred to thinking about action. Because that’s the emotion this album captures—that moment in between ignorance and action, when you know you should do something, and you just might.
“Am I the only one? Where are the others?” Lott sings, then concludes “I am the others.” It feels like things are about to get real. “We have the lungs and we have the air to shout,” he says, “...but we don’t.” It’s a downer, and it gets worse on “White Lies”, which starts soft and pretty despite ominous lyrics (“They take hold of our young/ They cut out our tongue”), then turns into a dark, industrial rave for the last minute. Given Lott’s film-scoring background, it’s easy to imagine the song’s coda soundtracking a scene set in a stroboscopic club from some tyrannical, dystopian future. And yet Son Lux hasn’t given up. “Your Day Will Come” lyrically reprises the opening track: “Close your eyes/ Swallow the sun/ You have only just begun.” Darkness may cover the outside world, but inside, hope is brewing.
Son Lux’s avant-pop has always leaned more heavily on avant than pop, and Bones is probably too skittery for a breakout commercial hit (though “Change is Everything” could be a dark horse). Given the album’s staccato beats, bronchitis vocals, strings that may not be strings, flutes that probably aren’t flutes, unexpected blasts of horn-like sounds that couldn’t possibly be horns, it’s not an album you can sing along to from front to back, and given the subject matter, it probably shouldn’t be. Sometimes knowing that you’re about to sing is enough.
