Monday 21 February 2011



Everything is outta sight

QBiM SPiNS The Luays' Too Beautiful to Work

The buoyant and spirited title track to The Luyas‘ Too Beautiful To Work opens their sophomore disc with a lot of promise.  Its quirky rhythm and melodies, the textured arrangement, all come together to form a very beguiling proposition.  The rest of the album isn’t as easy to love right off the bat.  Take the second song, “Worth Mentioning” for example.  Here, the textures get rough and ragged, shredding the song’s finer points into a pulpy mess by the end of it’s 3:48.  It’s the Freddy Kreuger to the album opener’s Fred Rogers.

That’s basically how the rest of Too Beautiful To Work plays out for me.  Atmospheric and moody one minute (“Tiny Head”) disjointed and angular the next (“Moodslayer”), then (sort of) poppy and melodic the next (“Cold Canada”).  You’re sure never to be bored by The Luyas.  Their live shows are a spectacle to behold, as evidenced in this Vimeo clip taken at their multi-media experience at last fall’s Pop Montreal festival.

Too Beautiful To Work is an enchanting record, certainly one I’m recommending you check out for yourself.  I’m not sure if it will be a record I’ll go back to a lot in the next little while, but I’m certainly more inclined to spin it than the Radiohead disc that dropped on Friday.  As for my initial reactions to The King of Limbs, not much has changed.  At least with Too Beautiful To Work, my initial reaction has softened and warmed.

Too Beautiful To Work is released on February 22 by Idée Fixe in Canada, and Dead Oceans in the U.S.

MP3: The Luyas “Too Beautiful To Work”
Facebook: The Luyas
Twitter: The Luyas





by J. Di Gioia | Comments Off

This entry was posted on Monday, February 21st, 2011 at 8:35 am and is filed under MP3, QBiM SPiNS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.