FORMAT: CD Digipak

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What does it mean to come of age? Does it have to do with maturity? Isn’t it one of the most difficult moments in the personal development of a person, a moment in which, little by little, while you’re trying to find yourself amidst an incredible confusion of feelings and sensations, you realize that outside of yourself, people expect things of you?

“The Great Unwanted” was without a doubt a wake-up call that sounded halfway around the world: 50,000 copies sold across 5 oceans, including a top ten on Japanese sales lists; media like The Times, The Guardian, Uncut and Pitchfork were captivated by what they declared to be an innovative and complex pop album, a new way of revising and understanding the canon of styles par excellence; continuous live performances for almost two intense years in which the Asian, European and North American public were dazzled by the solid live shows, which were also here on the peninsula… But the spiral reached its end, the times change, and reality hits hard. After a few hectic months, with barely time to breath, it was time to return to “real life” and that is where Andrew Laidlaw, compositional mind of the Greenwich (England) sextet found he had no place of his own. He had no choice but to move to the band’s studio, where he constantly played the piano until the wee hours of the morning, showering in the local community pool and concentrating entirely on making a second album that, as he himself recognizes, brought him to moments of fleeting madness.

This is the story that gives birth to “A Coming of Age”, the second full-length from LUCKY SOUL, a disc where they show us their excellence with melodies again, on songs as addictive and solid as “Woah Billy!”, “White Russian Doll” and “Up in Flames” (Art Terry’s, new keyboardist and old collaborator of Arthur Lee, arrival on the scene is noticeable), the fabulous imagination in the arrangements, whether they are winds (“Could Be I Don’t Belong Anywhere”), strings (“A Coming of Age”) or vocals (“Love”), and that way of reinventing pop and northern soul that has won them such a great legion of fans. But this particular coming of age carries a twist with it that is especially represented on songs like “Warm Water”, a search that allows for identifying that explosive mix of feelings that brings you from chaos to clarity, that necessary journey through the dark side in order to arrive to the light, to reach the point of surpassing the “what others expect of you”. All of this has taken form in lyrics full of bitterness and intensity, of melancholy and loss, lyrics that have followed the model of those masterpieces that fill “Pet Sounds”, and a greater amplitude of ways of seeing things when it comes to that stylistic revision that turns them into champions of pop: “Love” and “Upon Hilly Hills” have a hillbilly touch, “Could Be I Don’t Belong Anywhere” shows their rhythm & blues tendencies and “Southern Melancholy” moves slightly closer to Jamaica.

All of this is always tied to the silky voice of Ali Howard, more intense than ever, Victor Van Vugt (Nick Cave, SONS & DAUGHTERS, Kirsty Macoll, PJ Harvey) collaborating in the mixing, and an astonishing self-confidence that brought them even to refuse the offer of Tony Visconti, the legendary producer of David Bowie, to produce and helps them make “A Coming of Age” a solid, complete, complex album that is at the same time easily enjoyable, full of artists and nuances, while still being agile and able when it comes to connecting with the listener… Like the great classics.