Lorn’s debut full-length album Nothing Else (Brainfeeder) is an opus rich in many colors of emotion, from menacing depths to dejected melancholia to the victorious acceptance of defeat. The album has little context to orient you, resting as it does amidst the chaos of a post-Cosmogramma world where boundaries are but a quaint memory and rules are something someone else must have been concerned about a long time ago. Listeners are forced to understand the album’s story by themselves, which from first drop is indeed drenched in an eerie, militaristic darkness.

However Nothing Else is no evil work, no matter how many times music journalists have used the word “dark” to describe it. So too the theme of militarism; yes of course this is a battle myth: in Track 1, “Grandfather,” the foreboding storm appears on the horizon as the evil begins to gather; in Track 2, “None an Island,” defense preparations get underway as warriors bide their fear with business and bid farewell to their loves; in Track 3, “Army of Fear,” forces are called to arms and line up to fight, to defend, to die… and the battle proceeds.

Listening to this album an epic strand of images pops into my head: ogres, beasts, monsters, spewing volcanoes, rumbling black streams, long-trodden trails, howls from the netherworld…I could write the script right now. Your adventure will no doubt be different, however the evocation of angst and fury and death knock you in the face so forcefully that many listeners, content with the viscerality of the music and its threat of violence, plunge the album’s depths no more. Saturated with blood-red stimulation they pull up the initial layer, crack it in their teeth and leave.

However there is much more to the album than the grim discovery of a brutal battle. There is love; you can hear it. There is also confusion and confidence, defiance and defeat, the light of hope against the umbra of pain. The existence of these nuances make the dark even darker, and the album even more profound. Nothing Else is a journey fraught with danger that you choose to take, because you want to know that you are alive.

Nothing Else is more than dark. It is post-dark, just as it is post-genre. It is unhinged, which for many is more frightening than evil itself; at least with evil you know where you stand. Many would choose to believe in hell rather than suffer an unknown fate, just as critics would demand musicians pick a mood and stick with it so they know whether to sit or stand, to dance or dream, to laugh or cry. If only life was as simple as the genre categories on iTunes.

For artists however, this unhinged world is a prime playground, because it is only in this realm of the absurd that one can truly be free, free to make something that matters in this world of sound bites and sales pitches. The unhinged is far more provocative than darkness. But without the standard structure of light and dark, how can we find ourselves?

We can’t. We are all lost. There is no “found;” we can locate ourselves in this life only through meaning created through beauty, music, art… and Nothing Else provides a poignant example of the power of such concern, and the efficacy of the will to manifest new planets of hope.

With grand conviction Lorn tells a story that is up to you to interpret, to conjure up your monsters and demons that will do battle by this soundtrack. This is music for people who pick up broken seashells, for those unafraid to stare into the abyss, for those who have accepted great pain into their hearts and now rest upon the final stage of grief.

Or for humans anywhere along this path, although they walk it unaware.

Nothing Else isn’t easy partyface music. If you would rather not contemplate the nuances of human emotion, then put this album to the back of your mind until you are ready, until your heart is aching someday, until your soul feels distraught, until you fall into the shadowy chasm of the drama of humanity and look around and ask yourself, “What is else not to be overcome?”

And you will have the answer: Nothing Else.