But Everybody's Gone,
So I Will Never Know
By
Scott Lawlor
Written by
Steve Sheppard
Life does indeed throw up some strange coincidences, when I
was a teenage lad I wrote a short story based on a man who had been in a
submarine for months working, he had heard turmoil going on above over the
radio chatter, and when he eventually rose to take a look he would find that a
pandemic of a truly evil nature had wiped out the entire human race, leaving
him as the last man on Earth.
Flip that in the aspect that this Scott Lawlor album is similar in content, but from outer space,
then you have a journey that were all partially involved in right now with the
album But Everybody's Gone, So I Will
Never Know, except in the case of this story and mine from yesteryear, the
virus keeps mutating until it destroys all life on the planet. We all of course
hope that never happens in our world, but this album is a very graphic voyage
of a man stuck in orbit trying to get home, and listening to the airwaves as
they tell tales of utter desolation and distress from below.
From the very first track to the last Lawlor has created a
true masterpiece of an album, I have got used to this constant flow of genius
from the artist, but here on this work he very cleverly combines, suspense, fear,
hope, and desperation into each and every piece.
Pandemic Unfolding begins the journey and relays a
constant narrative of media chatter and sounds coming across the coms system;
something we have all experienced lately, we’re locked in our homes and still
the news comes thick and fast and the deaths pile up on our screens.
Departure from Space
Station Omega is
artistically manifested with an extra sense of urgency written into the weave,
through Lawlor’s synths and keyboards one can really feel the astronaut’s
agitation and eagerness to do something, the piece is incredibly intense and
readies us for the next offering entitled Shelter
in Place, a calmer composition that continues this dramatic musical
narrative, a slow but defined sense of movement can be found here as we drift
onward.
The longest piece off the release is entitled Quarantined in Space. Imagine, you are
locked away, safe, but alone, secure, but you have that feeling of dread and a
very tangible fear about your own love ones, are they alive, have they
survived, or, have they succumbed. The piece gets even deeper at around the
half way marker, voice and com chatter and sounds of suffering break into the
system, and the sheer tension of this piece and growing apprehension of the
entire album is absolutely palpable.
A couple of months ago this happened in reality to our
planet, World Closing Down, the
pandemic which has ravaged our life, began to close its fingers around our
global throat, strangling the economies of even the largest nations and the
streets emptied, humanity had been humbled. Here Lawlor portrays that with such
a clever artistic endeavour and such a deadly hand upon the keyboards, one can
feel and hear the energies of a population now totally lost within the refrains
of this piece.
As you can imagine it was too much for our man and he made a
decision that would be against his orders, but did that even matter now? Approaching a Condemned World explains
a narrative of frustration, he now knows he has condemned himself to death, but
the drive to find out all that he can is now far stronger than any survival
instinct he has, and through Lawlor’s chilling content the small craft moves
closer to a devastated home world.
From this point, our penultimate track off the album, we can
now view the utter breakdown of society and the carnage of a world of ghosts
before us, within the offering But Everybody's
Gone, So I Will Never Know. This dream like interpretation quickly
manifests energies of nightmare proportions, the end is no longer near, the end
is here, the final cogs and wheels of life are slowing down, the world has
moved on, and into the loving arms of a global entropy, and through the medium
of the last composition Empty World,
we are left with one final visual, decay has replaced despair, hope has been
replaced by emptiness, we are now for a last few moments looking upon an barren
landscape, and into the very heart of the never ending void itself. Lawlor’s
piano here was so poignant and played with such a tenderness of spirit.
I’m not sure how many times I have said this, but each time I
do so, I truly mean it, but I believe that But
Everybody's Gone, So I Will Never Know in my view is Lawlor’s best work so
far. Lawlor has brought into this reality an album that tells a story of
something we are all currently living through right now, a terrible pandemic,
obviously what we all hope for and what seems to be the case, is that the end
game of our nightmare does not follow the same line of narrative as Lawlor’s
terrifying tale. However this is one magnificent offering, the artist has
stood back, changed the perspective of the current global pandemic, and come up
with an album that is so addictive to listen to, so hauntingly real, and so
truly disturbing, perhaps it is true that Scott
Lawlor is fast becoming the Stephen
King of Dark Ambient music.
