NOTE: jacket has a dented corner but VINYL IS MINT & UNPLAYED
After more than two years in stasis, Lukid boots Werk Discs back into life with an excellent new album, his finest yet. 'Lonely At The Top' is a suitably bleary-eyed awakening, feeling as if it's attempting to comprehend the rapid glut of information in the waking world, and failing to do so - opting for a massive spliff instead and allowing it all to smudge in by osmosis. Ok, so in the intervening years Lukid did usher out two singular 12"s of deconstructed House and Techno on his Glum label, both marking a distinct shift from his previous productions and which, in turn, clearly inform the deceptively freeform feel of this LP. And we say "deceptively" because there's a genuinely crafty pair of hands pulling the strings behind the abstract, distorted daubs of soundcolour and rhythmelody. But, like Actress's 'R.I.P', what separates this from becoming a mush of avant-garde texture and timbre experimentation is the instinctive and coherent sense of narration to 'Lonely At The Top', one which expands and contracts between dusted blobs of haunted swagger like 'Manchester' and the heat-sick title track through to 'Southpaw''s rugged bounce or the compelling emotion of 'USSR' via poignant vignettes like his OPN-esque 'The Life Of The Mind' or the achingly cute 'Snow Theme'. Easily Lukid's finest work to date and a strong counterpoint to the overly-emosh post-whatever albums doing the rounds at the moment.
