One or the other will remember that Jamie Lidell, together with Cristian Vogel, caused a few vertebrae with the album Head on 1999. Everyone loved it. Rightly so. At that time it was shown that it was possible to subordinate absolute skill to the work, to be up to date, without the start. The pure art was and is King for the now 51-year-old British, not fame or shine and gloria. It is seriously worked in Lidell. And thought.
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On his new album, too, he nested different sound areas with his idiosyncratic vocals, which he repeatedly stacked and chorically stacked on top of each other, so that spherical (a somewhat blurred term) and hally sound rooms are created that should not leave anyone cold. If you mean it badly with Lidell, you feel reminded of radiohead here and there, but only from afar. Lidell, who turned to electronic music music early after the trombone and guitar playing, pulls all the stops of his possibilities here.
In “How do I Land” he works with piano and xylophone, in “choralems” even with accordion and strings. The end of the world, which is carefully said, is conjured up, which is unfortunately too obvious. In “Unmashing”, operating with cracks and acoustic scratching is operated on, his voice, which is simply overwhelmingly beautiful, comes to full development in “Last Day of Mourning”. So would like to be called Rufus Wainwright. At the beginning of his solo career, Lidell saw himself as a beat boxing, sequenced one-man band, he removed from that. Now he is his own orchestra that plays according to the rules that are not of this world. Excessive beauty is celebrated here, but also decay and fear.
This review was first published in the MusikExpress 08/2025.