Boston instrumental collective Lesotho are highly adept at telling stories without using any words, as you’ll hear on A Flashing on Plain Glass, the band’s third album. Coming three years after their previous effort, A Flashing on Plain Glass uses the music to explore themes of impermanence and the fact that all things change eventually.
Bearing those ideas in mind while listening, it’s easy to connect with the message Lesothoset out to communicate. Songs like “Marigold” and “Frail Weapon” deal with a loud/quiet dynamic, subduing themselves until the time to employ big riffs and hard-hitting percussion. Other songs, like “Fetch Quest,” have a palpable sense of anxiety in the way they unfold, the loud and quiet sections teeming with energy and small movement.
Everything comes to a head on the title, final track. Lesotho take all of the tension created on each track and unleash it in a two-minute crescendo that comes in the second half of “A Flashing on Plain Glass” before quietly ending the record.
“As a band we processed a lot of our emotions around the despair and chaos happening in the modern world through this group of songs,” Lesotho reflect to Decibel. “We dug deeper into our personal influences and explored a more diverse approach to the songwriting, including incorporating elements of classical and pop and blending that with our post rock foundation. The result is an album that we feel stands on its own as a reflection of the times we’re in and how we’re coping with it. Many of the more thoughtful and serene moments on the record ended up becoming some of the heaviest music we’ve ever written.”
A Flashing on Plain Glass is out on March 13 via the band.
