Album Review: Lorem ipsum

Lorem ipsum is a stream-of-conscience poetry/industrial trip-hop album by Pale Rose Blush, formerly known as SD-2100 and otherwise known as Sam Densem. With a run-time barely over 20 minutes and with no tracks exceeding 3 minutes in length, it’s a brief but challenging listen. The whole time you’re left questioning if you’re being trolled by the known social media provocateur, or whether it is a sincere expression of art. I suspect it’s a bit of both.

Most of the songs are a hodge-podge of sampled audio and drum loops with vocals that are a steady stream of unfiltered internal monologue, occasionally accompanied by one or more disassociated voices that rarely ever harmonise – deliberately it seems. Due to the short duration of each song, the listener barely has enough time to find any sort of musical groove and the rapid changes are jarring with the only constant being the rambling, barely tuneful vocals and discordant harmonies which will be uncomfortably familiar to those of us who have waited at a large city bus depot at 3am on Saturday morning surrounded by the lost souls of the drunk and homeless.

As someone who, while completely sober, has listened to Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma in its entirety on more than one occasion, this style of album is not unfamiliar to me and there are moments of brilliance. Kerb Side Shaman starts as a collection of empty metaphors, possibly about life in general, before morphing into a raw and vulgar expression of lust. Jerk Artist is a wonderfully lyrical rap while Forgot To Take Out The Tag DGAF is like a Sam Hunt poem beautifully accompanied by a minimalist guitar track similar to Nine Inch Nails ‘Hurt’, this is possibly my favourite track.

Ultimately I’m reminded of my first foray into the world of whiskey ‘nosing’. Most whiskeys, even single malts, are blended. A master distiller takes samples from different barrels and mixes them together to make something that is palatable with delicate and nuanced flavours. And then there’s cask whiskey: Drawn from a single barrel it is a raw, unblended and intense fire water. With my first and only sip of cask whiskey, I felt the coating of my tongue being scoured away and my tastebuds being isolated and exposed in liquid fire. It takes a certain type of person to enjoy single cask whiskeys, and the same goes for Lorem ipsum. It’s raw, unblended and unfiltered and like a barrel of whiskey, the concepts and style explored by Pale Rose Blush may improve with age, or perhaps better still, be blended with other concepts to make something more nuanced and palatable to the average music consumer.