DC's Lenorable is hard to pin down. Are they post-punk? Shoegaze? Gothic? New Order for a new age? (A dangerous proposition, certainly.)
They're many things, but perhaps most importantly, they're a bit of everything. Their earlier demos started out noisy before veering towards electronics in middle age. Now, fully formed, Lenorable is lo-fi gothwave, synthpop for your darker side. Case in point: they released an entire EP based on Edgar Allen Poe stories that was also ripe with Machiavelli references. Disconnect, their second effort, traverses a hazy underworld of ambient black noise, with vocals emanating from the void and beats that urge you toward it.
My first contact with Lenorable's music came at the Velvet Lounge last night, where they played with fellow nightdwellers Ars Phoenix and Semita Serpens. Lenorable's stage setup is low lights and lots of smoke, silhouetting singer Lisa Reed as she bobs about and almost obscuring guitarist Ian Graham entirely. If Reed is the ghost beckoning you to follow, Graham is the puppetmaster in the shadows, driving the enterprise forward with a frantic shoegaze guitar. It's a perfect fit for their sound, whose all-encompassing, near-drowning quality only increases in person. Have a listen to "Metamorphosis II," the track off of their EP that best captures this quality. If you get lost in the fog, don't say I didn't warn you.
