Luxury
the latest & the greatest
Reviewed by Brad Caviness
Great art is often born of great pain. Suffering can alter an artist's perspective to focus on the deeper issues of life: Love, belonging, regret, joy, death. Mortality is something the members of Luxury have spent the past year-and-a-half contemplating, after three band mates were nearly fatally injured in a car wreck following the '95 Cornerstone Festival. Though it had a number of songs written for a new project, when the Luxury members were recovered enough to actually start recording, most of the tracks got scrapped as too superficial. However, the new songs the group came up with take a surprising turn, considering its ordeal. On its first album, Amazing and Thank You, Luxury, while in perfect health, recorded an album of melancholy, ache and sadness. For the follow-up, Luxury sings an anthem to the joy of living with the specter of death fresh in its mind. "This is my time to say what's on my mind/and try to move your soul as well as I am able," Jamey Bozeman sings in "From The Lion Within," and cries carpe diem with the chorus, "Now that you are free/be what you will be/and have the wonderful world of luxury." Musically, Luxury has undergone as profound a transformation as it has lyrically. Jamey Bozeman's vocals still at times recall the droll inflection of Morrissey, but now, with his new sunny disposition, Bozeman sounds like Morrissey on Prozac. And instead of Amazing's melodic drone, the latest puts Lee Bozeman's guitar comfortably up front, constructing a handful of catchy, listener-friendly, near-rock anthems on the front end of the record and several haunting acoustic ballads on the back half. It also helps that there's not one bad song in the set. If the latest has the staying power to keep me coming back to it as often as I'm listening to it these days, it will be a contender for my best of '97 list.