The cover art of Lost in Reflections depicts a sort of bizarre, surrealistic roundtable of clones in business suits, sitting with their arms folded and staring at each other as if they had all just swindled one another in the most heinous way possible. The rest is black. It's truly a strange scene, one undoubtedly meant to be a reflection of the album's vaguely spectral title. Thomas Ekelund (the man behind Dead Letters...) writes of the album that it is, to a large extent, an outgrowth of his diagnosis and subsequent battle with borderline personality disorder, and the attendant feelings of alienation, isolation, and the perturbation of the sense of self. He describes his personal degeneration as having gotten to the point where his image of himself was of “An empty shell containing oozing, black bile and nothing else.” For all this marked doom and gloom, it's interesting that the most salient feature of the album is its approachability.
A listener going into this album would be right to expect a plunging, pit-of-despair excursion through black fields draped with mist, the moaning intestines of glacial caverns and abandoned, decaying toy factories, and at points, we do get those sorts of typical dark ambient tropes. However, much more often we are submerged in a more subtle, profound, and strangely comforting seclusion. Set adrift on a sturdy but pliable raft of electronic snaps, crackles, and pops, we are borne gently to and fro by layered currents of iridescent guitar melodies and rolling swells of delicate fuzz. There is no doubt a strain of loneliness and pain suffered in solitude that runs through each of these songs, but it's the kind of neurosis that you can bring home to mom. As hard as this album tries to be tortured and inaccessible, it can't shake the fact that it's actually a very beautiful and generally pleasant experience.
This is not to say that we've got an I'm From Barcelona album on our hands here. There are a couple tracks (“Lost and Losing,” “In Crowded Rooms, On Empty Streets”) that at least break ground on that pit of despair, alerting us to the darker side to Ekelund's project; but even these moments end up resolving themselves into graceful phantasms of melodies. I suppose that these subtle swayings of emotion are just another manifestation of the album's theme, but as illustrations of an ailment that Ekelund says “inevitably drapes every aspect of life in shadows that range from shades of gray to coal black,” I can't help but feel that some of that terror and despair has not been fully transcribed.
If this album is meant to be a declaration and relation of feelings of anguish, existential anxiety, and sequestration, I must say that it has failed. However, there is a type of invitation here, a form of calling into loneliness. We are not asked to empathize with this album, and we are not dragged screaming by its tendrils into the heart of darkness. Instead we are nudged, led quietly by our hands to a place where someone has found something of value, and then we are left there. A child's fortress inside a giant rotting stump deep in the forest, a dock with no boat or house on the shore of a lake long since turned to swamp — we are left alone, sure, but we are also left with the hope of coming to terms with that fact and of finding something worth being alone for.
1. This Room Seems Empty Without You
2. Lost Or Losing
3. What Stays And What Fades Away
4. Himmelschreibenden Herzen
5. What I Wouldn't Give To Feel Alive
6. In Crowded Rooms, On Empty Streets
More about: Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words
