Album review: The Bright Light Social Hour’s new record Emergency Leisure is here to cure what ails us
Fans of The Bright Light Social Hour have been waiting patiently for their new album, Emergency Leisure (Escondido Sound) to drop ever since it was announced earlier this spring. It’s been three years since the release of their last LP, Jude Vol. II, and a lot has changed with the band since then.
Original founding members Jackie O’Brien (bass/vocals) and Curtis Roush (guitar/vocals) have been open about their travails, including the tragic and untimely loss of O’Brien’s brother who was also the band’s manager. Then, shortly before the pandemic took over the planet, the band itself fell apart leaving O’Brien and Roush questioning their future. Add to that two years of pandemic shut-downs that decimated live music (and those who earn their living from it), and no one would have blamed the pair for calling it quits. Instead, O’Brien and Roush did what artists do. They took their struggles and leveraged them for their art. To their credit, rather than simply rebuilding the band as it had been, they took the opportunity to expand and evolve their sound around what their newly recruited members had to offer.
While lots of bands have chemistry, The Bright Light Social Hour in its present iteration is an entire laboratory. O’Brien and Roush are now joined by Zac Catanzaro (drums), Mia Carruthers (keys/vocals) and Juan “Alfredo” Ríos (percussion). Each member is a lifelong creator with immense talent in their own right. The result of this stone soup of artistic excellence is an album with incredible balance and dimension. Indeed, Emergency Leisure is deceptively fun and easy to listen to the first time through, but with each subsequent listen layers of musical complexity and artistic poignancy are revealed.
When the first song from the album “Not New” was released earlier this year as a single, we got a glimpse of what was to come. Embracing a disco motif, O’Brien’s funky bass and Catanzaro’s tight rhythms underscore Roush’s achingly smooth tenor and Carruthers’ far-out keys. By the time Rios hits us with the cowbell three quarters of the way through, they’re cooking hard on a bona fide dance track that you’d have to be made of stone to resist. Just don’t make the mistake of writing off Emergency Leisure as a frivolous party album. Yes, you can dance to it, but ultimately these songs are made for listening. A good pair of headphones will serve you well here.
The next track, “Most High” brings cosmic vocal vibrations to a powerful topic. O’Brien describes the song saying, “My brother (and the band’s longtime manager) passed away in my arms on the shore of Lake Travis after succumbing to bipolar. As crazy as it sounds, it was an uncannily beautiful moment. I witnessed the sky opening by way of some monolithic, benevolent, divine force. I was filled with sublime peace and ecstatic joy, deeply humbled in the face of supreme love. Total life affirmed in death.” Translating an experience like this into song is no small feat, but O’Brien and Roush support one another with ethereal vocals and celestial lyrics that convey an authentic spiritual experience while refusing to succumb to crass sentimentality.
From here each track progressively builds in emotional intensity, expanding the vibe of the album using powerfully sensual expressions of longing and desire with a strong vein of intoxicating melancholy running through the center of all the fun. “Small Celebrations” is a seductively simple triumph of songwriting – full sound, lush vocals and lyrics that evoke the sweet victory of surviving by any means necessary. “Prefecture” gives us a disarmingly vulnerable O’Brien plaintively singing about unrequited love alongside some soulfully standout percussion work by Rios.
By the time we get to “Lifers Only” the album has us primed for its existential climax, offering up that big psych-rock sound The Bright Light Social Hour does so well. Catanzaro’s masterful drumming shines through on this track. He’s not just keeping time in the background, he’s the embodied heartbeat of the band around whom everyone else is weaving a powerful spell. Upon its conclusion, “Lifers Only” slides headfirst into “Death of a Lifer,” an experimental track that grabs us with dissonant, powerful post-punk industrial sounds that change unpredictably for a full minute, throbbing in our ears ecstatically and refusing to let us think of anything else. It’s musical punctuation making a profound point.
The last three songs of the album are a smooth ride all the way home. It’s a testament to the band’s creative vision that this album delivers right up to the very end. The can’t-miss track “Call My Name” is hot joy. Carruthers’ keys add breathtaking richness, filling in the lines and calling to mind epic ensembles like The Commodores or Chicago, generating a big, bold sound and demanding surrender to the groove. The final track, “Empty Fields” dreamily bids us a cool after-hours farewell; a meaningful goodbye at the end of a very good first date, leaving us wanting more (in the best possible way).
The death of the American rock album has been greatly exaggerated. From start to finish, Emergency Leisure delivers an experience greater than the sum of its parts. Gorgeously arranged and produced, it’s a journey worth taking again and again. This isn’t just a collection of songs about the band’s catharsis in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It’s an invitation to catharsis for each one of us who has survived the past few years. A little Emergency Leisure is what we all need right now.
As if a new LP weren’t enough, The Bright Light Social Hour is also treating us to a tour that runs through November of this year. They’re playing Mohawk 9/30/23.
Featured photo by Andrea Escobar
Album cover image by Jaycee Grover
You must be logged in to post a comment.