If you have heard Lotus Plaza’s new album Spooky Action At A Distance, the soaring track “Monoliths” is likely to make the biggest impression. Lockett Pundt has created a track that rivals Deerhunter’s “Desire Lines” in both its immediacy and its accessibility, making the song (and ultimately the album as a whole) that is a tough sell in a music listening community that can tend to over-analyze and over-think what they hear. Here is a song with a fairly basic structure, rich but subtle guitar layers, and a pretty average vocalist leading the show.
Average, that is, until the closing minute, where Pundt adds vocal tracks and reveals a range that has never sounded, well, so frontman-like. And like that, with his declaration that “one of these days (he’ll) come around,” a pleasant tune becomes something as big as a skyscraper. It’s triumphant, moving music, and it closes any book on whether Lockett Pundt deserves to have his name in the same sentence as Bradford Cox. He does, and we might not even have seen his creative ceiling yet.
