(2020) NZCA Lines - Pure Luxury


Review:
Thanks to his busy schedule touring and recording with Metronomy and Christine & the Queens, it’s not unusual for NZCA Lines‘ Michael Lovett to go several years without releasing an album. During the four years between Infinite Summer and Pure Luxury, however, his music underwent some dramatic changes. His first album without longtime creative partner Charlie Alex March, Pure Luxury finds Lovett handling the bulk of the programming and production duties. It’s also his first set of songs about the real world instead of sci-fi inspired concepts — when everyday life is as fraught as it was in the late 2010s and early 2020s, there’s no need to rely on dystopian fantasies. These differences make Pure Luxury much more immediate, and immediately relevant, than Lovett’s other albums. While NZCA/Lines and Infinite Summer were both filled with immaculately crafted electro pop, they were so subtle and refined that they could seem overly polite on first listen. Lovett knows the age of Brexit and climate change doesn’t have time for that kind of nuance, so he sheds his previously retiring style for an impatient, kinetic blend of funk, disco, and electro. “Pure Luxury” packs more energy into its first few moments than NZCA Lines’ two previous album combined, along with some artful homages to Prince, Beck, and P-Funk. From its wealth of textures — bubbling arpeggios, rotund synth-bass, syrupy strings, and crisp drum patterns — to Lovett’s impassioned falsetto, Pure Luxury is much more present than anything he’s done before, yet it never feels dumbed-down. As he sends up materialism and hedonism, he captures the mood that living for the moment is understandable when it seems like there might not be many moments left. Lovett allows himself a rare moment of anger on “Larsen,” which bids farewell to the Larsen C ice shelf with seething synths and guitars, but more often, he’s satirically festive on songs like “Opening Night,” “Real Good Time” and “For Your Love,” a lush disco ballad where the line “I feel the danger in the things we do/What have I got to lose?” could refer to a fraught relationship or the fraught state of the world. As he parties like it’s 2020 on Pure Luxury, Lovett proves it’s possible to decry the issues of the times and have some fun doing it.





Tracklist:



Media Report:
Genre: synth-pop
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits