Album Premiere: Lamniformes, You Can’t Do This Alone

Lamniformes, the songwriting project of multi-instrumentalist Ian Cory (Bellows, Humeysha, podcast Lamniformes Radio), has its feet in two worlds. Informed as much by Cory’s experience in the Brooklyn indie-rock circuit as by his love for the sounds of sludge and post-metal, Lamniformes is a band that defies easy categorization. Picture Old Man Gloom writing bedroom pop, or Mount Eerie on a Neurosis binge. The project’s previous release, Sisyphean, is both heartbreaking and head-banging, an achingly beautiful collection that combines melody with soul-crushing distortion. Now, it has been re-imagined and transformed as the remix album, You Can’t Do This Alone.

Lamniformes would be nothing without collaboration. To bring his evocative blend of post-metal and indie rock to life, Cory always employs an “it takes a village” approach. You Can’t Do This Alone, takes that impulse to its logical extreme, bringing in six musicians to transform his songs into entirely new compositions. Those six collaborators have pushed Lamniformes into new directions, transforming previous release Sisyphean’s soulful sludge into a kaleidoscope of fresh sounds. Doom metal guitars grind atop hard trap percussion. Trip-hop and downtempo electronica rub shoulders with glitch and ambience. The result is a remix album that completely changes its source without losing its emotional core — or soaring melodies. By drawing together producers from across the musical spectrum, from hip-hop (Saint Thrillah) to heavy metal (Fabio Brienza of Varaha) and IDM (Noumenah) to modern classical (Adam Holmes), You Can’t Do This Alone reaffirms the power of music to connect people across great distances. The album gives Sisyphean the send-off it deserves while breaking down any limitations on where Lamniformes could go next.

You Can’t Do This Alone will be released digitally on April 9. Preorder, here. In the meantime, Ghettoblaster has the pleasure of offering a stream of the record for your consumption. Cory had this to say about it:

“Making music can be a pretty lonely process even under the best of circumstances. You spend hours cooped up in a studio tweaking details of a song, working over micro-seconds of sound to get the balance juuuust right only to send the fruits of that labor out into a vast digital void without knowing if a single person will hear it. You don’t need me to tell you that this last year did not feature the best of circumstances. But despite that, putting together You Can’t Do This Alone never felt lonely. Whether in Los Angeles, Chicago, or closer to home in New York my collaborators were only an email away.

“I’m immensely grateful for the creative daring and new perspectives that Fabio, Andrew, Joey, Frank, Adam, and Zain offered this record. Moreover, I’ve been grateful for the connection to the outside world and musical camaraderie that I’ve formed through working with them. It can be tough to hype up your own music sometimes, but the work that my remixers have put into You Can’t Do This Alone makes it easy for me to say that this record kicks ass. I’m excited for everyone to give it a listen whether they’ve heard the original material or not, and for them to hear the fantastic music that my collaborators have cooked up.”

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Photo by Richard Gin