Alex Lahey
The Best of Luck Club
Release Date: May 17, 2019
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Dead Oceans
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Album Review: The Best of Luck Club by Alex Lahey
Great, Based on 9 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
Alex Lahey's 2017 debut, I Love You Like a Brother, arrived with a high-energy, riff-ready rock album elevated by her clever wordplay and knack for addictive melodies. The Best of Luck Club not only brings more of the same, but also finds Lahey spreading her wings a bit, finding new sounds and styles to feed her lyrics on everyday life. At the start, Lahey mainly sticks to the wheelhouse of her debut, with strong guitar work and catchy melodies.
Based on rating 8/10
Australian songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Alex Lahey asks during the second track on her sophomore album. And by the sheer velocity of the power-pop core that runs deep throughout the spine of The Best Of Luck Club, it sounds like she is. On her 2017 debut I Love You Like A Brother, Lahey touched upon the intricacies of living; the nuanced relationships we build both around us and within our selves, but on The Best Of Luck Club things are taken to a brand new joyous level.
Based on rating 8/10
Melbourne, Australia's Alex Lahey made a strong first impression in 2017 with the release of her debut album, I Love You Like A Brother, a charming blast of personable power pop that was packed to the gills with wit, cheek and some big time hooks. Having since travelled the world, Lahey returns with some new life experiences to share on her sophomore album, The Best of Luck Club. Like a wiser, older sibling, album two is the product of being holed up in studios in both Nashville and Melbourne with co-producer Catherine Marks (St ….
Based on rating 7.8/10
When Alex Lahey released a charming debut album, I Love You Like a Brother, in October 2017, gay marriage wasn't yet legal in her home country of Australia. Its follow-up, The Best of Luck Club, is a welcome and wide-open look into the artist's personal life, packed with songs about mid-twenties inertia and queer romance that flow as naturally as an embellished story from the boozed-up patron on the next bar stool. She might start the night as a stranger, but by closing time, she's got your number and you're calling her "bud." Flashes of this same chumminess shone throughout her debut, but Lahey avoids redundancies by tinkering with her sound.
Based on rating 7/10
Some songwriters are interesting because they tell you things you may not know, and others are remarkable because they have a gift for expressing the thoughts and feelings that most of us share. Alex Lahey clearly falls into the latter category, and while the nuts and bolts of human interaction aren't uncharted territory in pop music, she builds clever and witty art from the ups and downs of friendship and relationships. She also matches her lyrics with some potent music, hooky tunes that suggest pop-punk without that subgenre's more unfortunate cliches, and after showing what she could do on her 2017 debut album, I Love You Like a Brother, she's gotten just a bit more ambitious on her sophomore effort, 2019's The Best of Luck Club.
Based on rating 7/10
Somewhere in the wake of Courtney Barnett's hundred-foot-wave of cultural impact lies an entire fleet of Australian artists, poised for invasion, disparate in all but heritage, offering up the sounds of down under to sun-starved shores. The likes of Press Club, The Chats, Amyl and The Sniffers, Tropical Fuck Storm, and Stella Donnelly are all at varying levels of underground appreciation, any one of which likely to break out in a big way at any moment. Aside from the aforementioned Press Club, perhaps the likeliest contender for a swim in the mainstream is Alex Lahey.
Based on rating 3.5/5
Alex Lahey's debut 'I Love You Like A Brother' was jam-packed with hooks, wit and charm, a standout first effort from the Melbourne songwriter. Follow-up 'The Best Of Luck Club' largely treads the same path; choruses burst out with exuberance, vocals are delivered with knowing winks, and, in particular on self-care anthem 'Don't Be So Hard On Yourself', it's largely a sensitive, caring listen. However, while 'I Love You Like A Brother' was littered with memorable choruses that would be lodged in your brain after one listen, it takes a good while of digging into 'The Best Of Luck Club' to find something that sticks.
Based on rating 6/10
There's a moment halfway through Alex Lahey's The Best of Luck Club when a saxophone triumphantly explodes into life and lifts the whole record several notches. It's cheesy and spikey; a blaze of red velvet across faded denim. Her debut album had a bunch of similar moments - its follow up feels like a missed opportunity. Lahey says she aimed to rail against pretension and fakery on her new album, inspired as it is by dive-bar conversations with the residents of Nashville.
Opinion: Excellent
After finishing for the day in her Nashville studio, Alex Lahey spent her evenings descending downwards into dive bars, past peeling posters of '60s rock bands. The walls were adorned in salubrious red, the leather upholstery shaped by the backsides of regulars who rarely leave for home. Rather than be intimated by the clientele, Lahey instead struck up conversations.
'The Best of Luck Club'
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