Bowery Electric

There was a period, straddling the old and new millennium, when a whirlwind of sounds swept through the world of music. The ashes of dream-pop and 80s new wave/post-punk experiences flowed into the new decade with the start of a new wave that had little to do with the recent past: it was time for a music rooted in dub traditions, whose genesis had completely different origins. The era of the Bristol Sound was about to begin, a handful of years in which two or three collectives upended the coordinates we'd grown used to.

In the wake of these experiences, some were determined to go further, drawing on the previous two decades to propose something new. It's in this context that Bowery Electric emerged, a duo formed in 1993 in New York from the partnership between Martha Schwendener and Lawrence Chandler. Their intention was to blend various elements, including drone-music, shoegaze and a transfigured form of post-rock. On their first two albums (especially on "Beat") their musical formula became immediately clear, though only partially effective: there were simply too many influences, and it wasn't easy to funnel so many ideas into a fully realized result.

Their infatuation with trip-hop, and perhaps also the four-year hiatus for reflection, allowed the New York duo to arrive at the dawn of the 2000s with a much clearer vision. "Lushlife" is an album teeming with distant, seductive sounds, each one opening a kind of portal. "Lushlife" evokes the hum of a battered, damp city at night. "Lushlife" folds into itself the arrangements of an unfinished symphony. "Lushlife" is the album that should have launched a glorious career, but instead marked the beginning of the end. In a sort of story told backwards, we can state right away that the release of this album sealed the fate of Bowery Electric. Various factors, including poor commercial response, pushed the pair to call it quits for good, despite universal critical acclaim.

For this writer it was a genuine tragedy, since this album deserved not only a follow-up but a resurgence in popularity proportional to its worth. "Lushlife" masterfully brings together the lessons of the shoegaze greats and the rhythms of trip-hop; it contains all the melancholy of the Philly Sound of the likes of Gaye and Mayfield, there's even an attempt at a single (isn't "Freedom Fighter" pop in its own way?), the whole thing entangled in an irresistible seduction for cinematic soundtracks.

This last point is a constant throughout the album: every sample or instrumental passage reveals an innate gift for creating landscapes that seem to have a life beyond the song itself. It's genuinely hard to come out unscathed from this work, amid tight, hushed rhythms immersed and dissolved in a sea of scratches, shoegaze guitars, sampled strings. Music that's nocturnal, smoky, sordid. Although the instrumentals take precedence over the vocals, Martha's voice is a waking dream: deep, almost too deep, nearly painful to listen to, capable of stirring emotion at every turn.

The record opens with the hazy atmospheres of "Floating World". Amid electronic hisses and violin patterns left to roam free, we notice pulsing bass notes in the background pairing with a lumbering, repetitive beat, forming a rhythmic glue that supports the melodies. The singer, with darkness in her heart and a touch of languor, guides the track masterfully. On the title track, atmospheres suited to a futuristic film noir set in a neighborhood shrouded in the darkest night take over: guitar inserts lock perfectly into the relentless beat, background noises sound like shredded strings, the voice is the song of a solitary angel, almost dream-pop in its vocal delivery, so graceful and dreamy is it. One of the album's smartest moves is exactly this: pairing two seemingly discordant elements, a relaxed voice against a rhythmic backdrop of an entirely different, far more forceful and decisive nature. The bass, played by the singer herself, strings together a series of notes that make the ears reverberate, carving out a harsh, biting churn.

"Shook Ones" ramps up the rhythmic side, bastardizing the resonance of the kick drum—this time acidic and metallic—with the vocals following the same register with a few added electronic touches. The samples that surface in the middle of the track are once again snippets of classical instruments, with digital particles floating like bubbles in the air. "Psalms of Survival" is calmer and murkier, built around a series of highly toxic notes; the keyboard this time repeats the same three notes throughout the whole piece, managing to create a vicious circle with devastating effects; some electronic touches can still be heard in the distance, enriching a track that is already stunning and infectious on its own.

"Soul City" can be seen as an instrumental interlude to calm the waters: the bass-drum machine-keyboards setup manages to build a surprising, unprecedented melody. It's striking how easily this duo manages to piece together, with so few tools, sonic motifs that are, in their own way, complex and deeply sensual.

Halfway through the tracklist comes the only single to be pulled from the record, "Freedom Fighter". On this track the shoegaze influence is strongly felt, with guitars soaked in reverb and feedback. Within the gaps between the most disparate samples (besides the classical instruments already mentioned, you can hear industrial clangs), walls of guitar noise and electronic drones creep in. If this isn't a masterpiece, it comes very close. The video is also gorgeous, a hymn to freedom shot in chiaroscuro tones, perfectly in tune with the song.

Toward the end of the record, the mutant trip-hop of "Saved", a bleak dub ballad ("Deep Blue"), and night seen in slow motion with eyes turned to the moon ("After Landing") follow one another with great fluidity. The moods keep shifting, and repetitiveness is never even a passing shadow.

At the close of the record comes perhaps its boldest track, "Passages". Electronic sounds bordering on ambient, no guitars at all, a strong trust placed in Martha's voice, which takes on the responsibility of carrying the track with only the beat for support until the halfway point. The end result is six minutes of pure dreamlike ecstasy in the vein of Labradford, amid a clattering hi-hat, diluted, piercing sounds that leave the mind numb, tiny shards of sound glittering with moving intensity. The final drift made up of vocal phrasing, scratches and small guitar chords is exactly what a record this bold can afford itself.

"Lushlife" is the record that every trip-hop fan should own, the work that every music lover should hear at least once in their life. The swan song of a band whose lack of success will always remain a mystery.

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11/11/2021