Release Date: Sep 24, 2013
Genre(s): Electronic, Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Club/Dance
Record label: In My Room
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Danish producer Anders Trentemøller has hinted at long playing greatness for some time. Previous albums, 2006?s The Last Resort and Into the Great Wide Yonder four years later showed promise, but an over reliance on moodscapes meant they meandered at times, resulting in a lack of cohesion despite containing great standalone tracks. Lost does not suffer from this problem; it’s a fully functioning collection that shows an impressive breadth.
Anders Trentemøller is hard to figure. As a celebrated DJ and techno producer, Trentemøller has pumped massive festival crowds and splashed forth go-go gaudy remixes of Scandinavian VIPs like The Knife, Röyksopp and Robyn. Meanwhile, as an album artist, the Danish multi-instrumentalist often crafts moody and cinematic tracks, understated vistas better suited to a more intimate stage.
With his early work being club-aimed music that was still musically rich enough for headphone listening, Danish producer Trentemøller came on like a composition student with a dark streak, plus a love of progressive house music and techno. His debut album, 2006's The Last Resort, was a deep, dark, and delicious overabundance of bass and reverb, thumping away like Berlin or Detroit techno but then layering melodies that touched upon pop, all while the producer side of the artist dropped every glitchy trick in the book. It would seem like he was showing off if those plentiful edits and layers-upon-layers didn't work, but when he went indie pop and soundtrack-esque on 2010's The Great White Yonder, the results varied.
Let's get it out the way: Lost is likely to be the most cohesive album by a solo music producer you'll hear this year. Yes, that sounds like the shameless critical wankery you find carelessly regurgitated by hopeful marketeers but really, it can be justified. At two years shy of 40 with numerous EPs and compilations under his belt, Trentemøller has been in this business for a long time.
Anders Trentemøller is a slippery character, but slippery like a seasoned shape shifter more than a banana peel. Just when you think you've gotten a grasp on what he's about, he drops something like Lost in your lap and you're back at square one. Simply refusing to be pigeonholed, the Danish producer has managed to stray even further from the lively electronic style that was his making.
The release of “Never Stop Running”, the first single from his new full-length Lost, sparked a lot of excitement amongst Trentemøller fans. The drums build from a tribal romp to a panicked bubbling, rife with stealthy, undercover bass—the kind that unintentionally nods to a techno-master’s version of footwork. Jonny Pierce of the Drums swoops in to set the scene for a distant dystopian landscape, crooning with a combination of innocent yearning and pop-worthy sentimentality.
Danish producer Anders Trentemøller became something of a word of mouth sensation with the immersive, inward looking atmospheres of 2006’s excellent The Last Resort. He then branched out into less solipsistic territory, incorporating indie-rock dynamics on 2010’s Into The Great Wide Yonder. Lost further develops that trend, largely through collaborations with vocalists drawn from the likes of Low, The Drums and The Raveonettes.
2010's Into The Great Wide Yonder was so grand and cinematic, you might have thought Anders Trentemøller had moved from Copenhagen to Hollywood. On Lost, he's gone in the opposite direction. While some music sounds like it belongs in a Paul Thomas Anderson film or an explosive episode of Breaking Bad, this is mostly a song-based album, with guest vocalists (Low, the Drums' Jonny Pierce, Sune Wagner of the Raveonettes) at the fore.
Danish producer Anders Trentemoller creates ambient electronic music like no other as he sends his listeners on an emotional sonic journey. For his third LP, Trentemoller does not stray from his chilled, ambient staple and constructs an album that weaves a moody, dark undertone to light and airy vocals. Trentemoller has pulled together a wide array of sounds; if these songs were not on the same album one may think each track was crafted by different artists; this proves to be equally an impressive feat and frustrating factor for #Lost# as the shift in ambiance is sometimes jarring.
‘Lost’ is the fourth album from Danish producer Trentemøller and sees him joined by a host of collaborators including members of The Raveonettes, Ghost Society and Blonde Redhead to name just a few. It starts of with the simple yet affecting atmospheric ballad ‘The Dream’ which features the wonderful harmonies of Low. Another high point is the brutal unsettling ‘Trails’, its industrial pulse giving way to an ocean of techno, playful sound effects and percussion flurries.