I think it is fair to say that when it comes to music, there were two decades known as the eighties. The modern re-writing of history would have you believe that everyone went around in jumpsuits and headbands, listening to saccharine pop and hair metal with their sleeves rolled up to their elbows Miami Vice style. Not me, I was in the other decade, probably sporting a donkey jacket and DMs, stood in a muddy field waiting for New Model Army to come on stage and possibly whistling The Specials dystopian classic Ghost Town. The reality lies somewhere in between but there is no denying that it was a time of great creativity as people charged over the musical barricades that the punks had kicked down for us.
It is then totally expected that bands of today look to that era for inspiration and do so with a the advantage of hindsight and a modern appreciation for the era, extolling its virtues and dodging the cliché. LUCKYandLOVE are just such a band and a New Romantic heart beats at the centre of this record (we called them records back then.) And the forth coming album Lucky + Love is a wonderful marriage of the past and the present, heart and technology, motion and emotion, a serious nod to the past, very definitely of the here and now and gazing excitedly into the future.
It takes the musical otherness of the likes of Kraftwerk and humanizes it through lush vocals and hazy electronica, has the elegance and aloofness of the Blitz Kid originators and somehow acts as a musical elevator running between up town, up scale night clubs and a jukebox in a bar on the fringes of the universe. It is at once dreamy and sonorous, yet wonderfully lucid and focused, it sits at a place where the chilled out dance set meets the stoner haze, where EDM becomes cinematic soundtracking, where dreams meet drama.
The beauty of this album is that it ties atmosphere and ethereality to an ever growing purpose, remains odd and otherworldly yet still sounds hypnotic and enticing. Maybe music like this is a bit too clever for the mass appeal that it deserves, it would be great if this was the stuff of late night alternative radio and the après club playlists. Maybe it is enough for now that it is our little secret, something us self appointed music snobs can bond over and call our own before the secret gets out. Shh…let’s just keep this between you and me, just for a while at least. Okay?
