Luluc
The new album by Luluc, Diamonds, opens on a Texas highway. “Driving into San Antone, we learned that Doug Sahm song,” Zoë Randell sings in her warm, pitch-perfect contralto on the title track, referencing a classic by the great Texas songwriter. A gentle conga-and-shaker rhythm sets time, an accent that typifies multi-instrumentalist Steve Hassett’s subtle, precise approach to production. A saxophone hums, an acoustic guitar strums.
Setting established, if only for a moment (a few couplets later she’s recalling a gig 1,700 miles north with J Mascis at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor), Luluc embarks on a kind of travelog, through rain that’s “frozen and hardened into stone,” hail that “looks just like snow,” a cold earth “covered in dead leaves” and “aching to be green.” The song “Moonbeam” glistens with Randell’s allusions to silver light, golden hues and “a quick little dance” that once caught her eye.
Though hardly a concept album, Diamonds opens on Lone Star State pavement and concludes with a kind of benediction with Randell repeating the word “good night” at the end of “The Sky.” Rich with allusions to the natural world and layered with arrangements that shimmer without being gaudy, Luluc’s fifth album is a precisely rendered meditation on wonders too stunning to ignore, emotions too real to dismiss and melodies too beguiling to forget.
“The sky was just showing off, so pink, radiant and deep,” Randell sings, her phrasing as singular as her tone, on “The Sky” as multi-instrumentalist Steve Hassett rolls through a seamless circle of guitar chords. “Purple and gray like a whisper or sigh.”
A 10-song collection that glides with the kind of harmonic grace that makes each song feel preordained, Diamonds is Luluc’s most elegant and accomplished work to date. It was produced, mixed and recorded by Hassett and Randell in their Brooklyn studio and at Luluc Studios in Victoria, Australia.
The product of a 14-year creative partnership that seems to grow sturdier with each session, Diamonds arrives three years after the lauded Dreamboat and a half-decade after Sculptor, Luluc’s mesmerizing third album for Sub Pop Records.
Their Sub Pop debut, 2014’s Passerby, was co-produced (with Aaron Dessner of the National) in Luluc’s adopted Brooklyn, NY home. As usual for Luluc’s albums, it ranked high on a number of fancy ‘year-end’ lists; NPR Music slotted it as its top album of the year (Bob Boilen’s a fan). The New Yorker’s Jay Ruttenberg described Randell’s vocal tone on Dreamboat as “crystalline and unflappable, with a strange beauty that verges on creepy,” calling it “the kind of voice that, on a movie soundtrack, portends unspeakable doom." Critic Stephen Thompson characterized Luluc’s work as “both disarmingly simple and, when called for, dreamily ornate.”
Diamonds is similarly adorned. Hassett and Randell move through territories and states both physical and ephemeral, driven at all times by a warm, velveteen palette that includes cello, restrained brass arrangements and reverb suggestive of Mazzy Star’s studio work. When the so-heavy-it-hurts “The Shore” concludes with a sparse, breathy saxophone solo, it seems to fill the recording with a gust of air.
The buoyant “Sleepyhead” clomps and gallops along with an ordered elegance, a lullaby that will linger long after your phone has slid off the side of the bed. Other touchstones? Simon and Garfunkel, Nico, Nick Drake and Marianne Faithfull’s records in the 1960s. Diamonds, in fact, features a deep, melancholy rendition of “As Tears Go By,” the Rolling Stones-penned weeper made popular by Faithfull.
Spend a little time with Diamonds and you’ll get it. Live with Diamonds for a few weeks –– go deep at high volume, listen with intention –– and it will embed itself in your psyche to become one of those records, a kind of talisman that will mark this moment, one that will glow with warmth each time you drop the metaphorical needle into its groove.