Ladytron – Time's Arrow
Although Ladytron's seventh album might have benefited from a lighter touch in places, it still manages to offer up a transcendent space to lose yourself
Liverpool electronic synth pioneers Ladytron return with their seventh offering, Time's Arrow. Playing this record is an immersive, embodied experience. Booming floor-to-wall synths circulate, while vocals reverberate and echo hauntingly, melting and dissolving in and out of shoegazey soundscapes. Often the album weaves between materiality and mystery. ‘Time waits for no-one […] / We are the dreamers, dreaming our way out of this town’, Glasgow's Helen Marnie’s sings, reverberated, on The Dreamers. It's a surrender to the inevitability of time's passage, but also of the power of dreaming as escape and a site of renewed possibility.
Dancing across the transient borderline between the real and the unreal, there’s times where dream merges into nightmare, where the unknown is less a site of possibility and more an ominous threat – perhaps the point, overall is that both can be true. At its best, Time's Arrow is mystical but commanding, with electric synthscapes pulling you deeper inward. However, at times the sonic landscape they’ve created risks suffocation, leaving little room for manoeuvre between one song to the next – a lighter touch in areas could stand to draw out more subtle nuances and make for a more compelling journey overall. On the whole, Time's Arrow is a unique offering from Ladytron – a transcendent space to lose yourself within.
Listen to: City of Angels, Misery Remember Me, California