Lacuna is the new album from Reno’s experimental and industrial rock wizard, An Identity. After a series of EPs and singles, Lacuna is the first full length release and it is mind bending and out of this world. An Identity likens the album to “a maze with arrows pointing you in all the wrong directions…puzzle pieces that don’t fit together” and I very much understand this theme after my listen to the LP. It starts off somber, with a wonderful piano instrumental track before starting off on this mesmerizing musical journey of sounds.
The lyrics throughout Lacuna are vulnerable and emotional. There is an openness from An Identity here. Many times during my listen to the track Undefined I found myself with a tinge of sadness as I understood where these words were coming from. There is tension, sadness, melancholy and beauty on this record. The album is peppered with instrumental tracks at key moments during the 45 minute playthrough, possibly to help offset the waves of emotions this album brings out. Its also possible the instrumentals are clues for whatever An Identity is trying to tell us as listeners.
Lacuna is definitely unlike anything I have listened to before. Even though I haven’t spent much time with the industrial/experimental rock genre, I understand that this is something completely different musically and conceptionally. It’s an album that has challenged me and made me think hard about what I was listening to. Not many pieces of music do this to me, but An Identity has accomplished this. But thinking about this even more, my time spent with the album was the arrangement set from my streaming app. It’s entirely possible the album isn’t meant to be listened in this way. Maybe I’ll try shuffle next time and see if I can exit this maze that An Identity has set forth.
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