Sweet Thief, by Luluc
The association of folk music with campfires and hootenannies isn’t always cringeworthy, because quiet communal warmth can feel welcome when contemporary existence becomes too loud and isolated. Luluc creates that sort of warmth on its sixth long-player, Sweet Thief,
It is not uncomplicated warmth: Zoë Randell sings within an alto range that wafts toward a cool and cautious beauty also heard from Art Garfunkel and the late Elliott Smith, and she and Steve Hassett write and perform music that encourages contemplation rather than singalongs.
With Randell and Hassett arranging, producing, and mixing everything in a studio they’ve been building in Brooklyn, and with Hassett playing most of the instruments, Luluc expresses a hush that owes more to the duo’s internal, and introverted, interactions than to either their adopted home of New York City or their original home of Melbourne, Australia.
Each song seems as if it’s a beautiful glass bubble blown into its unique shape by Randell’s and Hassett’s exhalations, then held in a nearly fluid state, mainly by guitars, and solidified and colored by careful application of woodwinds, strings, bass, percussion, and keyboards.
Inside each bubble, the reverberations differ: “Dopamine Slot Machine” could be a Cowboy Junkies hymn sung from a chapel in an ancient church without a congregation; “A Better Truth” could be a deceptively light acoustic stroll that mysteriously vanished from a Nick Drake album; and “Homesick in L.A.” could be a Raveonettes B-side of urban decay and storms of electric twanging.
The masterful Calexico-style romance of “No One Else’s Pen” and the sidelong Beach Boysian harmonic richness of “Rewarding Melody” take joy from being comforting and unique refuges. The LP title suggests time stolen, but listeners might be much more inclined to view this as an exchange: their ears granted to Luluc in return for beauty haunted by warmth.
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