Lorde Unmasked On 2012 First Band Album

Characters

Yes, Lorde is lordess (duchess?) of every single thing she sees in 2014, but what about her extreme youth, what about her earlier teenage years? How about the far past where god knows what we were doing and why? I mean, 2012? Remember 2012? We were all much younger than, Bob Dylan was on the charts, Dirty Projectors were singing love songs, and Frank Ocean was still straight. 

And Lorde was in a High School band called And They Were Masked, a sort of brutal goth-y prog rock band lead by Toby Arrow and Morgan Allen, very young, very easily influenced and very very serious. They released an album Characters and it is available on the internet for its sins.

The  claim’s Lorde (Well, Ella Yelich O’Connor) is lead singer are misleading, while  she is really all over the eleven song album she is mostly singing back up and  only gets Lorde-y on “Piece Of Mind” which, considering she didn’t wrote it, has the sort of shaking bigness we associate with her nowawdays. Otherwise, you aren’t really going to get what you want from Characters, the album, by teens, is a bit of a drag mish mash of self seriousness, not a disaster but certainly not meant for world wide scrutiny.

Lorde has a great deal of presence on “Piece Of Mind” but elsewhere she is singing mostly back up on these weird mixes of jazz and dark prog goth, certainly she isn’t the center of the world. The album has its own ambitiousness from noise to jazz to heavy duty pro-tools work outs. It isn’t fair to review em too harshly, so I won’t bother.

You can stream it, or by it for 84 cents here and if your scene is Lorde, get “Piece Of Mind”.