Lost in Space

Rate It! Avg: 4.5 (100 ratings)
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Lost in Space album cover
Album Information

Total Tracks: 11   Total Length: 43:05

eMusic Review 0

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David Pakman

eMusic Contributor

01.11.10
Not even Dr. Jonathan Smith could sabotage these gorgeous songs.
2002 | Label: SuperEgo Records

Since she's the reigning queen of contemporary female singer-songwriters, it's almost too obvious to point out the necessity of knowing Aimee Mann's work. Some tire of her nasal voice, but her intricately textured songs sound like they were painstakingly assembled note by note until they reached perfection. Her specialty is the mid-tempo Beatles-derived self-examining relationship tribute, like the waxing opener "Humpty Dumpty" or the clav-filled title track. Listen to the somewhat haunting but gentle "This Is How It Goes" and then get stuck into the hooky melody and careful harmonies in "Guys Like Me." As on almost all of her other albums, Aimee gives us aspiring songwriters something to shoot for: introspective and highly visual lyrics accompanied by songcraft and musical treatments that truly support and enhance the story. Lost in Space is anything but.

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Lost in Space

tsuru

I come back to this album time and time again (whether I want to or not). These songs go on, keep living, whether you are listening to them or not. Listen to them. They work. These are real songs with their own lives. And I do love to listen to them.

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A Document of Depression

ccbryan

Amiee's work has never been what you'd call cheerful, but this album is as bleak and unforgiving as its cover art. Usually Aimee can channel her malaise into catchy and interesting, idea-filled songs, but this album is unremitting in its melancholy.

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A perfect album

ebryant

There aren't too many of them, but this certainly fits the bill. The mood in it's entirety. The transition from track to track. The excellence in it's production. Incredible.

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They Say All Music Guide

It is, in a sense, a trick of the times that Lost in Space conveys such a vivid visual quality; thanks to the high profile given to her music on the Magnolia soundtrack, it’s now impossible to miss the narrative strength of Mann’s writing. The mood throughout this album is autumnal, with filmy keyboard beds and expressive shifts between major and minor enhancing the subdued eloquence of her lyrics. (A major chord at the end of “Guys Like Me offers an ironic twist on the smug portraiture that precedes it.) Though recorded free of the legal snarls that plagued most of her previous albums, Lost in Space seems to be mainly about alienation and, at least as a metaphor, addiction. The latter point is made clear in “This Is How It Goes,” with its assertions that “it’s all about drugs, it’s all about shame.” But it’s clear as well when Mann offers to “be your heroine” — or is it heroin? — amidst slithering slide guitars and rainy gray textures on “High on Sunday 51,” or confesses to seeking salvation where “It’s Not.” Recorded largely in Ryan Freeland’s home studio, some of these songs receive discreet electronic treatments — moments of abstract noise whose application always enhances the otherwise low-tech arrangements. For all the shadows that stretch across Lost in Space, what lingers in the wake of this music is the realization that Mann remains spectacularly underrated among contemporary songwriters; no one surpasses her as a master of poetic regret, and few albums examine the peculiar beauty of depression with the skill she brings to Lost in Space. – Robert L. Doerschuk

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