Lushy in the May 2009 issue of:
SEATTLE MAGAZINEOld School, New Music: Lushy
Buzz up!
(Photo by Hayley Young)
Sounds Like: The Jetsons with swizzle
sticks and distortion pedals
Typical Song Title: “Bottles, Bugles,
Bright Shiny Bells”
Groupies: Cocktail lovers wearing
skinny ties and sunglasses
Web Site: lushy.com
Musicians have always borrowed stylistic elements from their
predecessors—we’d be willing to bet even Cro-Magnon man repurposed a
catchy rhythm or two from Neanderthal rockers. And lately it seems
Seattle bands are staging a “revival of the fittest” of sorts—recycling
all manner of old sounds and refurbishing them with their own unique
and modern spin. Bringing to mind retro riffs by everyone from the
Rolling Stones to the Foggy Mountain Boys, from 1920s Parisian cabaret
acts to 1960s space-age cocktail numbers, local musicians of multiple
genres are looking back to move forward. Hey, even the jug band has
returned, so get out your washboard and play along.
Lushy
It’s hard to imagine a band called Lushy being anything other than fun.
Keyboard/sax/flute/drums player Andy Sodt freely admits the group was
created around cocktail lounge culture. He and guitarist/bassist Matt
Nims met in the early ’90s when they played ska together with the Tiny
Hat Orchestra. They knew vocalist Annabella Kirby from the local music
scene and, in 2000, roped her into a recording project in Sodt’s
basement. For two years, Lushy was a studio-only project. “We just
never came out of the basement,” says Kirby. “We were making all these
songs until one day I was like, ‘What are we doing? We have to play
this for people!’”
She called some friends in Palm Springs who were throwing a Tiki event
and booked their first show. “We got a distribution deal that same
week,” she says. “We’ve been playing out ever since.”
Marrying spacey, “cocktail-y” sounds from the ’60s and ’70s with their
own offbeat attitude, the band sounds like a vinyl record you might
find propped on Austin Powers’ mini bar. Even though they’ve been at it
for a decade now, there’s a newness in their music that makes you feel
like grabbing a drink and seeing where the night goes.
Ten years is a long time for any band to stick together, particularly a
throwback pop band in a city that prides itself on testing rock’s
limits. But with four albums of original material under their belt and
two more in the works for release this year, Lushy’s greatest asset may
be that they’ve never been so much of the Seattle music scene—perhaps a
byproduct of those years in Sodt’s basement, where it was easy to lose
track of the music other local bands were making. “It always seems like
we’re the exact opposite of every other band [in town],” Sodt says.
Nims adds that their music has “never had anything to do with what’s
been happening here. That’s not really by choice; it’s just…what feels
progressive to us.”