SOHN – Tremors
01. Tempest
02. The Wheel
03. Artifice
04. Bloodflows
05. Ransom Notes
06. Paralysed
07. Fool
08. Lights
09. Veto
10. Lesson
11. Tremors
The highly anticipated full length album Tremors, by UK producer, songwriter and singer Christopher Taylor aka SOHN opens strong and stays consistent throughout. Part of the soulful producer in the style of JAMES BLAKE and RHYE, SOHN is the forefront of the modern superfluous man: he’s trying to keep pace with a world that is too fast, too mean and too cold hearted. R&B vocals laid over soft, mellow electronic. The sparse background offsets the lush vocals beautifully.
This is an album full of twists and turns and no right angles. It’s the soundtrack you put on as you drive away and your childhood crumbles behind you.
The songs definitely have an air of questioning and laconic out-of-placeness. Maybe SOHN is reflecting on his adopted hometown of Vienna, on leaving his hometown of London. Maybe he is generally melancholy guy, but whatever the source, he has crafted a thoughtful and deep album in the sparse world of electronica. With multi-layered lyrics, he is pushing a genre where vocals are often an afterthought. On the The Wheel he sings ‘all this fuss over nothing/reinventing the wheel/always searching for something/that’s not real.’
Fool opens with fuzzed out synths that sound like BROADCAST, if they just kept pushing keys longer. Veto is the closest thing the album has to a relationship song, it has him claiming he won’t ‘Play your game anymore…’ The title track Tremors tells you about vibrations that “tear holes in the fabric of all that you know.” Might be also a good statement to sum up the album in general.
An excellent debut album from a talented multi-instrumentalist. SOHN leads the pack in the recent wave of eerie and reflective electronica.
NBHAP Ranking: 4/5
—