Once a decade or so — if we’re lucky — we stumble upon music that’s genuinely fresh. Music that echoes scarcely remembered classics in the mind’s ear, while striking a tone that we simply can’t remember having heard before. A band whose new releases we anticipate with breathless excitement, and whose inevitable passing we curse and mourn like the death of a loved one. We’re lucky; in 2005, we have Populuxe.
Born in Brooklyn toward the end of the 1990’s, POPULUXE is the brainchild of frontman Rob Shapiro (formerly of 2.5D and THUNDERBATS) — musical polymath, vintage-gear fanatic and (reportedly) gleefully ruthless perfectionist. The band coalesced around the prodigious talents of drummer Pete Straub — multi-credited session player (Glenn Ballard, Cliff Magness, etc.) and formerly of Double-D Nose, and guitar/keyboard prodigy Joshua Pickering, whose musical pedigree includes PODS (with ex-LEMONHEADS founder Ben Deily), and forays into everything from Drum & Bass to classic hardcore punk (THE LAST).
With a name borrowed from Thomas Hine’s seminal text on the space-age baroque style of the 50s and 60s, POPULUXE neatly defies any further categorization. Their sound suggests the Gershwin brothers writing for the New York Dolls; Count Basie reincarnated as Paul Westerberg; Big Star playing Steely Dan — yielding songs that are alternately sly and elegiac, hook strewn and haunting.
With the release of their second album, 'deep in an American evening...' — the follow-up to the 1998 debut 'a foggy day in brooklyn' — the band has achieved a new level of musical depth, wit and sheer pop lushness. 'American evening...' weaves a Robert Altman-like tapestry of love in decline; of desperation, defiance and rueful humor; of familiar lives, tethered together by a thin thread of hope.
And Populuxe gives us — as the somewhat jaded music listeners of the 21st century — something to hope for, too; that a band as rare as this will grace us with a long and unpredictable future.
