OOOOH! is hard on the outside and soft on the inside. Made in the spirit of unity, humanity, and poetry — disobediently renouncing the glory of personal triumph for the generosity of an honest experiment. On the last track of the album you’ll hear “Or do you only ever never want to make a single enemy? / That’s not freedom or humility / It’s nothing, honestly.” Oooh, that’s a bad baby!
A celebrated Toronto songwriter and performer, Alex Lukashevsky has always been disobedient. Which simply means, nothing is off the table when he’s looking for his poetic voice; when trying to find the realest I of the teller. As he sings on the lead track “that musician that’s dead”, “The musician is radical/ it’s the world that’s demented/ listening with their eyes, the music looks dented/ they’re over-represented. ”
OOOOH! was recorded in January 2024 at Sound Department in Toronto, engineered by Patrick Lefler (ROY), mixed by Grammy-nominated producer Matt Smith. All the songs were tracked live off the floor in two days, with one extra day for recording vocals, to keep the recording fully alive and breathing.
As leader of Deep Dark United, as a solo performer, and a sideman in Brodie Wests’ Eucalyptus and Luka Kuplowsky’s Ryokan Band, Alex has been an outsized influence on the Toronto music scene that spawned acts like Broken Social Scene and Owen Pallett. Pallett, who has toured with Lukashevsky, went so far as to record an entire album’s worth of Alex’s songs, backed by a full orchestra.
Lukashevsky, in addition to writing all the songs, plays guitar and sings on OOOOH!, doing both in ways that are soulful and spikey at the same time. Joining him on guitar and vocals is his oldest child, Charlie Lukashevsky, who, at 23, is already a talented performer and songwriter in his own right. Cocoa Corner also includes Aidan McConnell, an in-demand drummer and composer, Jack Johnston, a jazz bassist and Barry Harris acolyte, and percussionist Evan Cartwright (The Weather Station, U.S. Girls, Cola, Tasseomancy), who plays steel pan and marching drum. In addition to these performers, the album includes a tasty contribution from Meg Remy, the visionary musician and producer who is the leader of the critically acclaimed project U.S. Girls. Remy duets with Lukashevsky on the imagistic and sprawling album closer “things keep happening.”
About that album title: OOOOH! is taken straight from “that musician that’s dead” an arch and unhinged comment on the exertion required to navigate a lifetime of music making. Lukashevsky’s delivery of that one emotive word is a kind of cultural posture, but also a hundred percent primitive expression. The impact is never less than visceral. His vocal delivery ranges through rich baritone blues to keening falsettos to a kind of sprechstimme that periodically steps out from the music to grab the listener’s shirt. He doesn’t sound too nice, but he is sincere. When life gives you lemons lament.
For OOOOH! his first official full-length album since 2012’s Too Late Blues, (a collection of knotty-yet-effervescent tunes built upon the enchantingly serpentine harmonies of Lukashevsky and his vocal collaborators, Felicity Williams (Bahamas, Bernice) and Daniela Gesundheit (Snowblink, HYDRA), Alex has once again broken apart and rebuilt his own approach to music. Or rather he has allowed his music to build itself into strange new shapes that only fleetingly and coincidentally, but happily, resemble anything that might be called rock and roll.
The music you will hear on this recording veers off in multiple directions at once, and features a rock and roll spirit with a divergent heart. This is no sclerotic clomp of the Average Rock Song, but in fact a flood of humanity in all its darkness and moodiness and unpredictability. If most performers make songs that are like sports cars or pickup trucks to drive around, Lukashevsky has built something more akin to a rowboat in a tree: it’s weird and beautiful.
Alex Bad Baby Lukashevsky to release new album ‘OOOOH!’ on 24th October on Tin Angel Records
