Lana Del Rabies
Omnipotent Fuck
Feral Crone Recordings / Phage Tapes
Since coming onto our radar with 2018’s Shadow World, the Lana Del Rabies project of LA’s Sam An has continuously impressed and surprised us. On the one hand there’s LDR’s savvy use of the extremity and granularity of death industrial and related subgenres, packing compositions with grating textures and alternating between dynamic chaos and gruelling repetition. On the other there’s An’s decidedly personal approach to styles which are often clad in reference to generalized (and often abstracted) atrocity and extremity. New record Omnipotent Fuck continues that thread by making some minor adjustments to her sound while finding a new but fitting set of thematics.
The second part of a loose trilogy which began with the Le Temps Viendra EP earlier this year, Omnipotent Fuck continues the examination of “how eros affects the subconscious mind”, with this installment specifically examining “romantic posession by a demonic force”. Even without the promo copy that co-mingling of the demonic and erotic is easy to locate, as on centerpiece “Bedroom Sores”, where the repeated entreaty to “touch me” gradually loses any vestige of eroticism (“for the love of fuck touch me“) and gains increasingly gutteral distortion. Like the best films dealing with possession and haunting the literal question of the supernatural is superseded here by more ambiguous problems: are sexual drives and frustrations being redirected inward and turning into self-loathing or is the latter being outwardly exorcised through sexual compulsion?
That sort of unanswerable mindfuck is reflected in the record’s sound design. In comparison to the vast spaces, holy or stygian, through which Am’s takes on the laments of Anne Boleyn echoed on Viendra, much of Omnipotent Fuck has a much more tightly suffocating sound, connoting the claustrophobia of one’s own thoughts. The comparative scarcity of percussive programming or rhythmic loops in general also distinguishes Omnipotent Fuck from the last couple of Del Rabies works. Instead, the detuned frequencies which suddenly swarm in midway through “Consensual Pain”, along with the heavy phasing played with on that track, draw a direct line backwards, past LDR’s roots as a death industrial project and towards pure power electronics.
Despite the manic focus of its themes and much of its noise sources, Omnipotent Fuck is still proof positive of just how varied and malleable Lana Del Rabies is as a project. Hints of An’s interest in middle ages chorale (which featured so strongly in 2023’s excellent Strega Beata) briefly appear in the midst of “Wisdom Spit”, albeit as one small part in that piece’s swampy, bordering on psychedelic, reverb, and the entire affair ends with the digital screwing and tightening of samples into a single, untenable point which ultimately implodes. On the one hand it’s hard to imagine the forthcoming final part of this trilogy having any unturned stones left after the range of Le Temps Viendra and Omnipotent Fuck, on the other it seems inevitable that LDR will shock and impress us again. Recommended.
