Description
2023, 12″ LP, Self released.
Luxury Skin: the touch, the feel, the intimacy of chic emotional avant-rock.
Poetic and penumbral, sultry and sincere, Luxury Skin’s debut LP It’s All Over confidently serves up powerfully melodic parables on an alluring bed of attitude and emotional openness. Culling a range of diverse influences—from Nick Cave’s playful gravitas to Brecht and Weill’s provocative theatrical agitprop (think Lotte Lenya meets The Dresden Dolls in a piano lounge)—Luxury Skin is the latest musical journey of Juliet E. Gordon, former frontwoman of Californian alternative electronic outfit The Classical. After a move to New York that saw both the blossoming of a new relationship as well as the harsh slap of a global pandemic that robbed the world of embodied co-presence, Gordon found herself in 2022 grasping toward “the band” as a previously foreclosed mode of collective social practice. What does it sound and feel like, Luxury Skin asks, to explore what we are able to give and what we are able to receive in deeply transitional times? It’s not a coincidence that the intimacy and felt vitality of group work became instrumental in the creation of this LP, which Gordon conceptually considers “a musical fossil” of love and loneliness in a time of minimal transport, “a time capsule” that opens onto both the joys and pains of (re)learning how to be together.
It’s All Over elegantly performs and confrontationally invokes a wide breadth of characters, moods, and affective states from comic pagliaccio to tragic heroine, from blueswoman to bad bitch to best friend. Adorned by diaphanous electronics and string quartet overlays that undulate between plaintive and luscious, the album coolly collapses the club, the cabaret, and the concert hall into a musical dream space for living real life in a real way. Passionate dreamscapes swirl around the pianos and pizzicato of “Don’t You Recognize.” “Vows” slinks forth in equal parts blues band, electronics studio, and processed vocals whose calls sound as if they are coming from inside the mouth: “Are you breathing?” “This Time’s For Love” is a piano ballad crooner that perfectly translates the atmosphere of a place like Sid Gold’s Request Room, the karaoke piano bar where the album first debuted. And tracks like “Looking For You” and “Prometheus” brighten the repertoire like a deep breath, invigorating the listener with a sly wink and a grinning nudge. Touch this Skin, darling.
