Nick Lowe—Indoor Safari
With the help of Los Straitjackets, Nick Lowe awakens his dormant sense of playfulness on his first album in 11 years.
Nick Lowe—Indoor Safari [2024]
Nick Lowe left the rat race long ago, carving out a peculiar niche by crooning the sounds that populated the pop charts before the rise of the Beatles. Even knowing Lowe's particular predilicitions, the retro vibe of Indoor Safari—his first album in eleven years, following 2013's celebratory Christmas platter Quality Street: A Seasonal Selection for All the Family—comes as a bit of a jolt: this is an old-fashioned long-player, largely cobbled together from standalone singles that take on a different flavor when assembled as a collected work.
Indoor Safari is anchored by the three or four singles and EPs Lowe released between 2018 and 2020, most recorded with Los Straitjackets. Nick adopted the inland surf-lounge outfit as his backing band in 2019, not long after the Nashville-based group released a tribute album to the pub rocker. The cheekiness of their What's So Funny About Peace Love And… certainly appealed to Lowe but the singer/songwriter also was in need of new collaborators. Neil Brockbank, the producer who worked on every one of Lowe's records since The Impossible Bird in 1994, died in 2017, two years after the death of Bobby Irwin, a drummer for Roogalator who played regularly with Nick since the Cowboy Outfit.
Playing with Los Straitjackets awakened a sense of playfulness that went dormant in Lowe somewhere toward the back half of the 2000s. It'd certainly surface in concert but At My Age and The Old Magic, the last two non-holiday records he made with Brockbank, were so refined their rhythms seemed like a suggestion, not a pulse. That's hardly the case with Indoor Safari, which is the first Nick album with a prominent backbeat since The Impossible Bird. Not that Los Straitjackets have encouraged him to revive the reckless thunder of Rockpile; Nick is still determined to deliver age-appropriate music, he's merely rediscovered the pleasures of rocking in rhythm.
With their subtle but insistent swing and sharp twang, Los Straitjackets help Indoor Safari move along at a swift clip, adding plenty of welcome texture in the process. Their facility with different roots music complement's Lowe's interests in early rock & roll. They're as comfortable easing into complex chords emulating Brill Building pop as they are playing reconstituted rockabilly and that versatliity does give Indoor Safari a snap and kick that's been consciously absent from Lowe albums for a while. Nick clearly is re-energized by his new collaborators, too, ready to write jumping little numbers for his band to play. "Went to a Party," the song that kicks Indoor Safari in appropriately spirited fashion, hums to the brightest, liveliest hook he's written in some time and he's so playful on "Jet Pac Boomerang," he concludes the tune with a pointed quotation of "Please Please Me," the allusion to the Fab Four clearly punctuating where his current interests cease.
"Went to a Party" and "Jet Pac Boomerang" are two of the newer songs on Indoor Safari. They're surrounded by tunes that are either recycled, re-recorded, or rejiggered, the tweaks sometimes appearing significant, sometimes seeming subliminal. Initially reluctant to the idea of releasing a new album, believing the format no longer really existed, he was convinced to turn these songs into Indoor Safari which is a blessing. Particularly for veteran acts like Lowe, albums remain the currency of listening attention; leaving these tracks stranded on EPs would've been a disservice to both artist and audience. Plus, these songs gain strength from each other within the context Indoor Safari, revealing themselves as some of Lowe's strongest latter-day work. But the best thing about Indoor Safari is that it's simply a cracking good listen as a record qua record, offering plenty of melody, style and rhythm in a nifty little package. Often, that's all an album needs to be in order to satisfy.