Lackthereof – Your Anchor

Lackthereof is Danny Seim. Danny Seim is a member of Menomena. Menomena are a band from Portland, Oregon. Your Anchor is the ninth Lackthereof album, and this is a review of it. Now, we’re up to speed!

Seim is actually a lot more prolific than Menomena. While the latter has produced just three albums since 2003, Lackthereof actually pre-dates the main band, with Seim’s solo debut coming out way back in 1998. Lackthereof is something of a DIY, lo-fi project, with Your Anchor having been recorded in Seim’s basement. A lot of the time, the album does sound as though it was recorded in a basement, which is something worth bearing in mind. The sound is mostly constructed from a lot of bass hum, fuzzy drums, and Seim’s vocals. His voice has a kind of lazy, woozy style to it, which is very much in keeping with the album’s musical style but won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.

Despite the basement recording and lo-fi stylings, these songs are quite varied. There’s the grungey, slow-building grind of “Locked Upstairs”, the cluttered but epic-sounding “Last November” and the stomping “Choir Practice” with its melodic background flourishes and catchy chorus. The odd recording techniques lend all of these songs a slightly strange, deep atmosphere which tentatively walks the line between adding a welcome extra layer of depth and unnecessarily obfuscating the songs.

I can’t help but find myself thinking that the main deciding factor in whether a person enjoys Your Anchor consists of their knowledge and appreciation of Danny Seim’s previous work, both as Lackthereof and with Menomena. Your Anchor is not a particularly ambitious or large record, it is more of an experimental, personal album. With that in mind, it might well be doomed to obscurity, which I’m not sure is really fair – while it isn’t about to set the world on fire, this is a mildly interesting album.

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