Celebrating Nick Lutsko’s brilliant new album
Next Friday The Signal will be hosting what promises to be one of the most spectacular entertainment “happenings” of 2019: the release party for Nick Lutsko’s new album, Swords. A release party is always going to be a festive affair (unless you’re Morrissey) but Lutsko has earned a reputation for pageantry and showmanship that is simply unparalleled.
Backed by the Gimmix, the band of highly talented but vaguely menacing puppet people, Lutsko has assembled a playbill featuring Narcoleptic Birds, The Fridge, the UTC marching brass, Subterranean Cirqus, The Pop-Up Project, the Chattahooligans, giant puppets, and more.
It promises to be a party for the ages.
But is the album any good? Entirely written and produced by Lutsko, this project was three years in the making and described by Nick as “covering a wide range of topics highlighting my disillusionment with the current zeitgeist.”
That being what it is, there’s plenty to be disillusioned by and it would be all too easy to come across heavy-handed in expressing it, but you’ll find nothing heavy-handed here.
For all Nick’s uncanny showmanship, sense of style, and ability to create “happenings”, that’s utterly secondary to the care, time, attention, and meticulous craft that goes into his music.
Let me say that again, because it’s the crux of everything else I’m going to say about the album: Nick can plan and execute an event like nobody else, but that’s merely icing on the cake compared to the depth of his devotion to the music.
Swords isn’t good, it’s brilliant. In describing the music, there are names worth mentioning not as a basis of direct comparison so much as a means of establishing a starting point in the discussion. Oingo Boingo, Sparks, They Might Be Giants, Frank Zappa, even my own beloved Tom Waits…you could create a compilation album of songs from these artists and call it, Well What the Hell is This, Then?
None of them sounds much like any of the others, and Lutsko doesn’t deign to mimicry either, but there is a common thread that places them all firmly together: intelligent innovation, a defiance of convention not for its own sake but because their approach to music is simply unconventional.
The real magic of the album lies in the fact that as unconstrained as it may be, it doesn’t come across as “experimental”. To the contrary, to be as non-pop as it is, it has a huge pop appeal factor, and that is magic.
“Sick”, as non-faux Caribbean a tune as you’ll ever hear, has an absolutely gorgeous steel drum breakdown that, once you hear it, is the perfect counterpoint to the semi-industrial, alt-pop underpinnings of the tune. It’s easy to say that once you hear it, but to have conceived it in the first place? Not one in a million would have done that.
“Shakedown” is so Waits/Elfman (there’s a pairing that ought to happen one of these days) you could be excused for thinking it’s a cover, but it isn’t. It’s all Nick and it exhibits a combination of playfulness in execution and deadly seriousness in composition that is the calling card of Lutsko’s music.
“Salt”, “Stairwell”, and “Shadows” each has its own signature ranging from vintage rock to Looney Tunes, all of it meshing so well together that if Nick’s public appearances are “happenings” then his album is an experience (replete with a full complement of sibilants).
I don’t think it was lack of inspiration that required three years of work to create this album, it was a commitment to creating a work that is at once deeply personal and yet easily listenable.
It’s as though Lutsko, who already has the love of his fans and the respect and admiration of his peers, made a bet with himself to create something finer than anything that has preceded. He has without a doubt won that bet.
Come for the party, stay for the music, and bear witness to a legend in the making. That’s not hyperbole. People will be talking about this album and its release party for years to come and the only question I have is what will he do to top it next time? I don’t know, but I’d wager the next great project is already underway.
This is an album that undoubtedly started life as a lump of coal three years ago and is today as finally cut and multi-faceted a diamond as the local scene has ever produced. Intelligent, and beautifully composed and executed, a loving gift to friends and fans, Swords is one of the finest albums available today.