NAKED LUNCH - Lights (And A Slight Taste Of Death) - CD [NOV 7]

CD

“I founded this band, and I’ll bury it when I feel like it,” Naked Lunch mastermind, songwriter, and singer Oliver Welter once said. Obviously, he hasn’t felt like it yet. So it should come as no surprise that this band — believed by many to be long gone — is opening a new chapter in its eventful history, twelve years after their last critically acclaimed album All Is Fever (2013), with their new record Lights And A Slight Taste Of Death. And they’re doing so not only with style- and genre-defining albums like Songs For The Exhausted (2004) or This Atom Heart Of Ours (2007) — the latter earning them an Amadeus Award in their Austrian homeland — but also with countless high-energy live performances under their belt.

And now, following lineup changes and internal reshuffles, comes this — one might almost say outrageous record, on which, as seems to be the case with every Naked Lunch release, everything is once again at stake. Even the title itself brings together light and death — in small doses — signaling that here, once more, the “human condition” is being explored and mapped without reservation through the means of (pop) music. The madness, the perspective, and the journey of songwriter and singer Oliver Welter go deep with these songs, far-reaching — not least inward — and from there, back out into the world.

Lights And A Slight Taste Of Death is a 14-track tour de force; demanding and harsh, yet tender and embracing. It's an intimate self-examination, spanning grand ballads like the hauntingly beautiful Come Into My Arms or Love Don’t Love Him Anymore, to sweeping, sky-storming pop anthems such as To All And Everyone, We Could Be Beautiful, or Going Underground, and even includes completely unexpected expressive outbursts — like a free-jazz saxophone solo in the drugged-out If This Is The Last Song You Can Hear.

Lights And A Slight Taste Of Death thus takes its rightful place as a consistent continuation in the tightly woven, high quality discography of Naked Lunch. This is how it has to be no other way.

Tracklist: 

1. To All And Everyone
2. Only Hollow
3. We Could Be Beautiful
4. Go Away
5. Bring On The Lights
6. All The Same
7. Blackbird
8. Come Into My Arms
9. Fuck My Senses
10. If This Is The Last Song You Can Hear
11. I Saw
12. Love Don't Love Him Anymore
13. As I Lay Down Dying
14. Going Underground