There's nothing wrong with progress. Progress is good for musicians. So anyone who thought Alex Lahey was just going to keep making the same sort of uniformly excellent pow-pow-pow pop is in for a surprise with her new record. The Best of Luck Club is great, but it's varied, Lahey here showing a real evolution as an artist that is to be applauded. If the album, out on Friday via Dead Oceans, reveals anything about Alex, it's that she's capable of producing fantastic compositions that don't all sound like variations of the same song, a criticism that would have been fair to level at her otherwise-superb earlier recordings.
While "Don't Be So Hard on Yourself" and "I Don't Get Invited To Parties Anymore" sound a whole lot like the best songs on 2017's I Love You Like A Brother, there's a great deal here on The Best of Luck Club that is stylistically varied. "Unspoken History" is a lyrical and wildly-melodic ballad, while "Isabella" reveals the influence of a few Beatles records in Lahey's collection. The cuts sound very little like numbers on her first few records, and yet the compositions are just as catchy and affecting as any of those earlier, poppier offerings. Elsewhere, "Am I Doing It Right?" and "I Need to Move On" echo a tiny bit the sleek sort of thing you'd hear on the radio routinely in the Eighties, and to acknowledge that is not to disparage what's here, but to praise Alex's ear for crafting a near-perfect melody and writing some genuinely affecting lyrics to wrap around a big, big hook. Still, it's album-closer "I Want to Live With You" that is just beautiful. The tune, lush and languid where her first few songs were tight and punchy, is similar to the kind of thing Weyes Blood and Rufus Wainwright have previously offered up, with Lahey here taking a huge leap forward. It is a leap of the kind that provides the evidence heard throughout this record, with The Best of Luck Club proving just what a great songwriter and performer Alex Lahey has become.
The Best of Luck Club is out on Friday via Dead Oceans.
More details on Alex Lahey via the official website, or the official Facebook page.
[Photo: Callum Preston]