Lapsed is so close to being really great. The drone influence is really pronounced, and with their female vocalist they actually sound a bit like Boris at parts. This is straight-up noisegaze, but under the noise there are some subtle pleasant melodies, they’re just primitive and more buried than your usual shoegaze, but still dynamic enough to keep this from being a “true” drone release. Most of those pleasant melodies come from aforementioned female vocalist Isobel Sollenberger. She’s barely even there—god knows if she’s even saying actual words most of the time. She sounds like she couldn’t give a fuck less about her performance, which ironically shows how much she cares because it fits so well, and she brings the necessary foil to the band’s otherwise fuzzy chaos.

And for the first three tracks, it really, really works. The songs are enjoyable enough to justify their length by really drilling into your head. Then it drops off. The noise remains, but the dynamics under the songs start to dissipate as the album leans closer and closer towards droning noise and neglects the melodies underneath. That may sound great to a drone fan who might enjoy the cohesiveness of the album slowly breaking down, but to me it sounds more like it was unintentional and what we have here is another top-heavy album where the band ran out of good inspiration for the rest of it. Personally I find the latter half to just be uninteresting albeit passable, but I’m not much of a drone fan. Sollenberger’s vocals become sparser as well and they were the soft paste that held the beginning of the album together.

Kind of a letdown, but I would still recommend this to anyone who thinks it sounds interesting.