Lucksmiths - A Good Kind of Nervous

  by Tommy Gunnarsson

published: 20 / 8 / 2005

Label: Select Label
Format: N/A

intro

Tommy Gunnarsson writes about the slowly evolving impact on him of Australian indiepop trio the Lucksmiths' 1999 album 'A Good Kind of Nervous'

I still remember when I first heard the Lucksmiths. Even though I thought it sounded good, I didn't become completely hooked until a year or two later. But that first time, when my brother played their song 'Under the Rotunda' in his room next to mine, it stuck in my head.Then, in 1999, I got a mixtape from that same brother, containing some of the bands that was to play the Emmaboda Festival (which we were going to), and among them were these three Australian guys. He had picked mostly songs from their latest album, 'A Good Kind of Nervous', and I fell in love with them from that very first moment. I couldn’t wait to see them perform live at the festival, and I wanted to buy their records too. Luckily, their performance was fantastic, and I got to buy two of their albums at the festival, the aforementioned 'A Good Kind of Nervous' and the previous one, 'What Bird is That?'. Now, in 2005, they have released a handful more records. Even though I’m still a big fan of theirs, their records tend to be less and less interesting to me, which is partly because their songs are getting slower and slower. If you listen to the first album, 'The First Tape' (which is a re-release of… their first tape), the songs are very short and very fast, and if you listen to their latest album, 'Warmer Corners', the songs are not very short and not very fast either. And here we get to the point: the great thing about 'A Good Kind of Nervous' is that it captures the band somewhere in between these two stages. They have calmed down a bit, but the songs are still energetic and the lyrics are clever and funny, which is the one thing that hasn’t changed over the years. After a slow start with 'Caravanna', the album kicks off with the already mentioned 'Under the Rotunda', which is one of the best songs they have ever written, and further along the album’s playlist there are even more songs that could fit into that category: 'Train Robbers’ Wives', the beautiful 'Guess How Much I Love You', 'Punchlines' (with a great reference to the movie 'Airplane!'), 'Up'… well, you see, I could go on forever. Or at least for eleven songs. These are all classics to me. I don’t think The Lucksmiths will ever record such a wonderful bunch of songs ever again, even though they have come close with later attempts.

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