Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Luxury, Independent 2015.
I had never heard of the band Luxury until I recently came across them on Bandcamp.
They come from Georgia, USA and they’ve been around since the mid-1990s.
In that time they’ve put out approximately 10 albums, a few Eps and a couple of singles.
I started listening to their 1999 self-titled album and became intrigued so I went back to the earliest recording I could find, a cover of Adam & The Ants Goody Two Shoes released in 1994.
It was one of the demos they produced to hawk themselves around to record companies and to my ears it’s better than the original.
They bring a punky/grungy edge to the track that seems much more in keeping with the lyrical content than Adam Ant’s original version.
Like many bands Luxury were quite prolific in their early years churning out EPs and albums regularly but after releasing Health and Sport in 2005 they went through a hiatus that lasted for 10 years until it was broken by the release of Trophies.
Another short hiatus occurred before two solo records, one each to founding members (and brothers) Lee and Jamey Bozeman, were released in 2019.
Trophies is a wonderful album and shows that their extended break didn’t have any deleterious effects on their music making abilities.
It also shows that the band is back to full steam ahead mode with the solo releases being followed by the 2020 full band effort, One-Sided LP – literally a one-sided LP which was initially available only on vinyl.
After trawling my way through much of Luxury’s work I am surprised that they aren’t better known.
As the band says in their Bandcamp blurb “(they’ve) been on the fringes since 1994 making records and playing to occasional audiences.”
And it seems that being fringe dwellers has been a conscious decision because interestingly enough three of the members are Orthodox priests, so music is only a side project.
The band consists of the brothers Bozeman on guitars and vocals plus Chris Foley (bass), Glenn Black (drums) and Matt Hinton (guitar banjo mandolin).
Lee and Jamey Bozeman plus Chris foley are the three priests and they, including the entire band, are the subject of a new documentary, The Story of a Band Called Luxury, which focusses on the band’s ten-year hiatus and a touring van crash, that almost killed them and changed their lives forever.
Their story is certainly an unusual one for rock and roll but, excuse the pun, rock and roll is a very broad church.
