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Album: Austin Lucas, Somebody Loves You, (Suburban home)

Nick Coleman
Sunday 09 August 2009 00:00 BST
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Erstwhile punky troglodyte remade as a desperately soulful voice of new-old America. You might call it alt.bluegrass. It has banjos, fiddles and pedal-steels on it.

Lucas's voice is a reedy oboe of a thing, sometimes a bit flutey. The songs are inward, wordy and self-revealing, but not in a sentimental way: they burrow and burrow and leave little heaps in their tracks. You might find yourself one of the heaps, especially if you sense that Austin's consideration of death is not a rhetorical position. You should try to hear it.

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