Microscopic detail is where Benjamin Booker finds his best work. Lower, his third studio album and first in eight years, is a magnificent return for an artist who has consistently, crucially, honed in on the finer aspects we may miss in our day-to-day lives. Tinkering with those little oddities is where he finds success, where the crushes and triumphs of the world can be found. Lower provides chance after chance to connect with this, the themes Booker is so masterful at pulling together riding high through an album which stands as a paranoid punch, an instrumentally blissful and fearsome piece of work. Those opening moments of sinister appeal remain as shocking the first time around as they do on a repeat when your jaw no longer drops and you can focus on the intensity, the raging emotional form Lower is filled with.
Booming soundscapes are where we find those sincere details. Lower is filled with those. From the heightened horrors of Black Opps to the brilliant discomfort heard in its follow-up, LWA in the Trailer Park. Intensity is not all Booker brings to the table. There is a lived-in feel to those tuning acoustics on Pompeii Statues. Finding a place for the off-kilter and seemingly out-of-place twangs is all part of the sharp understanding Booker has for dissonance, for the cacophony which can come from those slow descents into madness. Head deeper into your mind and find a place clear of this overwhelming harshness. Easier for some. Lower is a letter-by-letter account of a busy mind, and for those who find themselves also distracted, struggling to keep their focus on one point or another, Pompeii Statues will bring on an intensity made good on through the rest of Lower. This need for a reflection, not on your life but of its direction, to find this similar momentum in another person, roars through Booker’s latest.
Something as touching and clawing as Slow Dance in a Gay Bar finds this feeling of self-estrangement well. Can we save ourselves without the intervention of another? Lower would have us think both are possible. In the conflict built throughout by Booker is a hope for the future, a sincerity and tenderness which takes the edge off harsher tracks found later on. Lower is filled with questions on what real love is and rather than show us the answers, Booker keeps them to himself, if he has them, that is. His latest album is filled with broad instrumentals, constantly shifting their tone and tempo for the sake of adapting this sense of never being close to satisfaction. It is a broad stroke, but a mesmerising turn from Booker.
Allow rebirth to come through, it does on New World. Those background noises, the whimsy and cheer found so briefly before the gut punch of a heavier sound on Same Kind of Lonely are transcendent, and brutal too. Marrying those two feelings, the contrast between them serving as the well Booker continually returns to is a masterclass. Once again, we dive into the depths of Booker’s work, and once more he provides tender and wizened insights into the world around him. Songs for the weary minds and the broken hearts. These are not love songs. These are not songs of hate, either. Lower is an articulation of sound as more than a backing track to your day, but as an example of its power to change the atmosphere around you, and the mood you feel yourself dealing with. Booker has a definitive power, and he uses it well through his third album.
