NAKED LUNCH – Lights (And A Slight Taste Of Death)

“I founded this band, and I’ll bury it when I feel like it,” Naked Lunch mastermind, songwriter, and singer Oliver Welter once said. Obviously, he hasn’t felt like it yet. So it should come as no surprise that this band — believed by many to be long gone — is opening a new chapter in its eventful history, twelve years after their last critically acclaimed album All Is Fever (2013), with their new record Lights And A Slight Taste Of Death. And they’re doing so not only with style- and genre-defining albums like Songs For The Exhausted (2004) or This Atom Heart Of Ours (2007) — the latter earning them an Amadeus Award in their Austrian homeland — but also with countless high-energy live performances under their belt. And now, following lineup changes and internal reshuffles, comes this — one might almost say — outrageous record, on which, as seems to be the case with every Naked Lunch release, everything is once again at stake. Even the title itself brings together light and death — in small doses — signaling that here, once more, the “human condition” is being explored and mapped without reservation through the means of (pop) music. The madness, the perspective, and the journey of songwriter and singer Oliver Welter go deep with these songs, far-reaching — not least inward — and from there, back out into the world. “For many, too many years, I asked myself almost daily whether I should even keep this band alive. Whether there were still people out there who’d find joy in a new record. And whether I was even still willing to reveal anything of my constant inner turmoil, that ceaseless, groundless swinging between bright light and its exact opposite. The urgent embrace of everything and everyone I hold dear — as documented in ‘To All And Everyone I Love’ — or the sheer destruction of myself, as brutally as possible described in the miniature piece ‘Fuck My Senses.’ Another, very real form of bodily destruction came during that time in the form of a bastard cancer, which held me captive — especially mentally — for 24 months, before finally (at least for now) letting me go again, allowing me to become functional in work and society once more. In contrast — and almost parallel to the illness — came the birth of my third child, an absolute beauty that washed away all the darkness as thoroughly as one could imagine. That I completely scrapped two fully written albums over the past, say, five years? Let’s just call that a gift…” — Oliver Welter The almost fateful encounter with musician and producer Wolfgang Lehmann (“the best and most talented music interpreter ever,” as Welter puts it) inspired Welter to finalize the arrangements and production of the various song drafts for Lights And A Slight Taste Of Death in Lehmann’s studio — with Lehmann also handling the final mix. All this, of course, was done with the support of longtime companions Alex Jezdinsky (drums) and Boris Hauf (keys/sax). Lights And A Slight Taste Of Death is a 14-track tour de force; demanding and harsh, yet tender and embracing. It’s an intimate self-examination, spanning grand ballads like the hauntingly beautiful Come Into My Arms or Love Don’t Love Him Anymore, to sweeping, sky-storming pop anthems such as To All And Everyone I Love, We Could Be Beautiful, or Going Underground, and even includes completely unexpected expressive outbursts — like a free-jazz saxophone solo in the drugged-out If This Is The Last Song You Can Hear. Lights And A Slight Taste Of Death thus takes its rightful place as a consistent continuation in the tightly woven, high-quality discography of Naked Lunch. This is how it has to be — no other way. we could be beautiful meaningless but so beautiful enormous and likely wonderful we could shine a light and then move on (We Could Be Beautiful)