The opening track ‘BLACK OPPS’ sets the stage with its existential pessimism, highlighting the CIA’s dark history of covert operations at home and abroad. The lines “Have a little dream / They shoot you in the head” make the clear allusion to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and other figures of Black liberation, whilst the chorus offers a grim takedown of the American Dream as Booker finds himself “Dying fighting / For a life I ain’t had yet”. Booker has spoken about simplifying his writing style on this album, a move which has led to every lyric on LOWER feeling pointed and essential, contributing to the holistic picture which Booker paints of his life as a queer Black man living in the shadows of segregation.
On the titular ‘LWA’ Booker contends with the poverty and isolation which characterised his childhood growing up in a trailer park outside Tampa, Florida, a place he contrasts with his time in LA on the following track ‘Pompeii Statues’. This song draws on Booker’s experience living in Skid Row and the “madness” of inequality on display in the epicentre of LA’s homeless epidemic, comparing it to a post-apocalyptic “fallout” as he highlights the failures of the state to protect the vulnerable in society. It is followed by the personal ‘Slow Dance in a Gay Bar’, a stunning ballad which sees Booker exploring his sexuality and reflecting on the beauty of “what this life can be” beyond the pervasive evils of capitalism. It’s a necessary moment of calm before the album’s brutal one-two punch of ‘Speaking with the Dead’ and ‘Rebecca Latimer Felton Takes a BBC’, tracks which confront slavery and lynching in the American South, spinning a twisted narrative between a slave owning senator and her fetishization of the men working in her fields.
Booker’s challenge to the continued subordination which his communities experience is nothing short of electrifying, his world-weary lyrics wrapped in the unconventional pairing of noisy shoegaze and southern soul. Although individual influences can be traced from the jangling noise of My Bloody Valentine and The Cure to the contemporary experimentalism of Jean Dawson, the exact blend of sounds is unique, particularly with Kenny Segal’s production bringing in a variety of samples and a distinctive weight and punch to the drums. It’s Segal’s hip hop sensibilities which ground LOWER, contributing a more precise grit to the record amongst its waves of noise and distortion. This album feels vast. It is both cold and compassionate, uncomfortable and uncompromising, boasting an impressively broad scope within its succinct 40-minute runtime. It is cohesive and holistic, personal and political, and January’s most essential new release.
★★★★½