LUH - Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing

The scope of LUH’s debut, ‘Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing’, is staggering. Inspired by grand ideas from the collapse of capitalism to the notion of post-humanist singularity, the duo of Ellery Roberts and Ebony Hoorn bring the nature of humanity into question. The record’s heart, though, is touchingly simple - two people standing up against the world.

Former WU LYF frontman Ellery met Ebony in a squat he and a few other musicians inhabited in the dying days of his former band. Struggling with the idea of fronting a group, feeling disconnected from the people around him and the music he was making, Ellery found instant inspiration in Ebony. Before long he abandoned everything and moved to Amsterdam to live with her, at which point LUH was born.

Together they discovered as much of the world as they could; from politics, to culture, to projections of the future. All of this information flashes through ‘Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing’ like a sped up newscast, the worries and troubles of the world speeding past with terrifying velocity while the steady, overarching theme of the record endures - Love Unites Humanity.

Ultimately, ‘Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing’ is just that, a series of love songs Ellery and Ebony wrote for each other, together. But there’s intensity and a underlying note of sorrow that comes from the record’s backstory, two people struggling to find their place in the world clinging on to the only thing they have, each other.

Initially, tracks like the darkly brooding, The Haxan Cloak-produced ‘I&I’ and ‘Future Blues’ stand out. Other moments fall a little flat outside of the album’s context. ‘Beneath The Concrete’ or ‘Lament’ for example, are powerful and haunting but never able to make waves in an album that peruses such intensity for such a sustained period of time. There are just a few too many of these aggressive, tumultuous ballads and the result is each one loses some of its power every time another crashes into being.

Moments where LUH lose their way are compensated for by the flashes of brilliance littered throughout. Whether it’s the jarring chaos of ‘$ORO’ or the mournful strings of ‘Someday Come’, this a debut that gives everything LUH have to offer and the result is honest, touching and raw.