Artist: LN
Album: Dirt Floor Hotel Part 2
Label: Velvet Blue Music
Tracks: 11
Review By: Jacob Gehman

It’s official now according to Velvet Blue’s website. LN no longer exists and “Dirt Floor Hotel Part 2” is LN’s final breathy kiss to the world. A lingering kiss on the cheek, bow and curtsey, adieu.

Anyone who has taken any kind of basic art class knows that some art speaks more with the negative space than where the paint brush makes the details on the canvas. Some of the entry examples of that are the tricky pictures where you get asked whether the painting is a picture of two silhouetted faces looking at each other or a single vase.

Similarly, Part 2 is devastatingly soft and subdued. Yet it is carefully crafted to where the emptiness speaks as loud as the music. It’s folky minimalism at it’s finest. The best songs are the ones where each note feels painfully drawn out, allowing the nothingness to creep up and threaten to overtake the song, halting it in mid-stride.

Consequentially, the worst parts of the album are where LN’s sound fills out into a full band with a strummed guitar with meandering bass lines, which force the nothingness to disappear and be divorced from the song. For the nothingness is as much a part of this album’s lineup as the singer and trying to cut it out would be like trying to make a 16 Horsepower song without David Eugene Edwards.

If you are into the stark indie folk, particularly of a more stripped down nature, LN should be right down your alley.