From the bluesy opener of Hard Liquor to the mechanical dance outro of Harbour, what’s most striking about ‘Rennen’ upon first listen is the panoply of influences and genres SOHN has drawn on. The auto tune-tweaked double tracks nod to Bon Iver, while the arrangements pay homage to James Blake and the production borrows from The Weekend; yet it’s so quintessentially SOHN.
His unmistakable, agile voice lends itself to the soulful melodies just as beautifully as the bluesy lines. The opener hears his celestial falsetto waver in the upper registers before plunging down and spiralling off in his tenor, while his stunning cries in the off-kilter ‘Rennen’ remind us that he’s as much a vocalist, as a producer.
The production is significantly less polished than the intricately crafted ‘Tremors’, yet it’s vastly more expansive than the debut. Man-behind-the-music Christopher Taylor says he limited each song to three main elements, a gamble that has massively paid off. Despite his own restrictions he’s still managed to create a beefy plethora of textures and twitches, whilst eschewing a cluttered sound. And by the sounds of the pots and pans, audible in ‘Falling’, it’s also forced him to be more resourceful.
What this also means is that the focus is now diverted to the essence of the song. You don’t have to listen to carefully to notice that the album’s lyrical content is largely political- which is not surprising considering Taylor’s relocation to the states during the presidential election.
Standout tracks ‘Conrad’ and ‘Primary’ are both painfully poignant, addressing the ominous political climate and marvelling at man’s tendency to be ignorant to the damage they self-inflict. The former track is one of the album’s more powerful moments, saying more in its one stanza than if the whole album up was filled with the kind of in your face preaching that must have seemed quite tempting at the time. But that’s not Taylor’s style. He demonstrates so cleverly that the music can speak just as loudly as the words when he illustrates the downfall of a country in ‘Primary’s lucid instrumental break, before ending with the line “Can I wake up now?” It’s all those little idiosyncrasies and the subtle but powerful messages that pull the album into cohesion and create an overall aesthetic that could only belong to SOHN.
