Curse of Lono - People In Cars (2021)

Curse of Lono’s Felix Bechtolsheimer had a crap year: he lost his father, uncle, ex-partner, and band. He found escape and salvation in his music, reconstructing his sound to enfold alt-country into his cocktail of Wilco, The National, Cohen and Hazelwood. The new album, People In Cars, is named after Mike Mandel’s 2017 photo book of people seen through the windows of cars at an LA intersection in 1970 and, as such, is themed around the many roads he’s travelled and those who’ve shared the journey.

It opens with the steady scuffling Let Your Love Rain Down On Me, his burr of a voice a soft shade of melancholy and loss as, driving to just numb the ache, he sings, “Now I can taste the fear in your barroom eyes/There’s a tremor deep in your playground lies/So I bolt the door and I start to shout/‘I swear to god I ain’t ever coming out’”. The refrain strikes an upbeat note, carried over into the bluesy shuffle of Think I’m Alright Now, Joe Harvey Whyte on pedal steel and Felix adopting his familiar vocal slide, handclaps rhythm carrying the chiming Velvets-like Ursula Andress, another song about the need for love, sipping margaritas in the back seat, feeling wasted (“no change for the slot machine, no coffee, juice or nicotine/I left that bunker on my hands and on my knees”).

An atmospheric slow piano ballad coloured by strings, Man Down is a stream of consciousness musing on mortality (“We’re all just empty vessels, our lights turn off and on/Fill us up and watch us flicker with the glimpses we’ve been shown/Now the postman brings the letters and the letters bring the pain/And the pain brings to the surface what will never be again/And the photographs are whispers of a light that slipped away”) that ends with the line “the last one out the door turn out the light/And don’t forget to turn the music off”.

With Ellie and Imogen Mason on backing vocals, the slightly Latin sway and breathy vocals of Stepping Out again adopts the notion of inevitability (“A storm’s on the way, swear it’s coming soon don’t fret dear/There’s nothing we can do/Let me lie here, bolt the door and watch the walls – come – down…It’s a lonely sober ride/Headlights eyeing up the open road/Tell me is this how it ends? One last transmission before the signal fades? ”) but also of the relief (“crave the silence on the bathroom floor/Away from all that noise/Let the violence rage, cut me loose so we can drown alone”), once again showing his way with a sign offline in “Won’t you scrub my soul, I can’t seem to get the stains to fade”.

The mesmerising, melodic and atmospheric So Damn Beautiful was written after the death of his ex-girlfriend following a drug-filled weekend affair and heroin overdose. He shares, “I wrote the song from the point of view of the guy, who I didn’t know, of that dirty weekend, and that overdose. When you OD on heroin you do feel pretty great until it goes wrong, so that stuff came back into the picture.” Its pulsing, rhythmically chugging, steel-lined verses, and soaring chorus casts him as the ill-fated fling, unaware of what has gone on, while Canadian Tess Parks sings the role of the traumatised paramour. The song also links to the alt-country roll of Alabaster Charlie, about a similar scenario involving his best friend, who survived (but is now long dead) as he asks, “did you have to do it boy, did you have to steal her away from me?” and “Did she come around again? Did she scream your name as I lay sweating in the corner?/Just let it lie/We made our peace before the flood washed you away”. The pallor of alabaster (“your decaffeinated skin”) is also reflected in the metronomic rhythm of the intimately crooned Lou meets Leonard In Your Arms that again speaks of needing a little taste, a little scratch to ease the itch (“Just a little taste, just a little bump on the way back home…Need a little something for the pain Need a little fire, need a little spark, ignite those burnt out stars/Try to recalibrate my soul (for you)”).

The name of the band comes from Hunter S. Thompson and Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride is another such reference, a percussive shuffle with electric guitar and keys propulsion inspired by Gilles Bertin, the ‘French Sid Vicious’ and heroin addict who stole €3 million from an armoured truck depot in 1988 and lived in hiding in Portugal, officially ‘dead’, until 2016, though, to be fair, the lyrics primarily focus on the addiction (“As the asphalt melts beneath my feet I know it’s not enough/I’ll throw away what’s left of me for an armful of your love”).

Another stream of consciousness provides the penultimate softly sung piano, pedal steel, and cello ballad Don’t Take Your Love Away with its stark imagery of despair (“Slit my tongue on a razor wire, bloody mouth but she’s ready to fly…Synthetic substitutes. She whispered, “I’m gonna go wild on you. Yeah, I just wanna go wild on you…Gouge my eyes just to block you out…is this where it dies tonight?”). The album closes on the nine-minute measured metronomic percussive drive of Timeslipping, a song informed by his father’s passing, grief, emptiness and the ineluctable nature of time and of the unbearable pain of trying to express those feelings (“I don’t think I can talk it through again, not now/The view just keeps on changing/And there’s nothing – left of me these days/Of the man that I was yesterday/When you held me in your arms”).

Introspective, reflective, at times steeped in memories of darkness and despair, but always reaching to take hold of the light, it is clearly his most personal album to date and, while it might not be as immediately accessible as past more urgent and dynamic outings, the accumulative impact is mesmerising.