At long last Lovespirals‘ 5th album is finally out! Buy/stream/listen on all your favorite sites or buy it directly from Ryan and I on our Bandcamp store. Limited edition 4-panel eco-wallet CDs with a matching pin are still available at the time of writing. You can also check out ‘Life Goes On’ via Pandora and give a thumbs up to your fave tracks!
“Stunning… Gorgeous… Some of Ryan Lum’s best work as a songwriter and musician.. Haunting and ethereal. Absolutely Anji Bee’s most nuanced vocals… beautiful and sultry.” — Matt Rowe, MusicTAP
5 years in the making, Lovespirals‘ 5th full-length outing, ‘Life Goes On,’ explores themes of love, loss, and the pains of the passage of time. Now 51, band founder, Ryan Lum reflects, “My gear was pretty primitive when I first started making music in 1990. After all these years, I wanted to see if I could create an album as sonically masterful as some of my favorite albums from back then, particularly those of the Cocteau Twins.”
Lum’s music has long been linked to the mysterious Scottish trio, particularly when his band was known as Love Spirals Downwards, before the turn of the millennium, when he bonded with vocalist/lyricist Anji Bee over the then-new British trip-hop and jungle scene, especially moodier artists like Massive Attack, Portishead, and LTJ Bukem’s Good Looking Records crew.
Though Lovespirals were born out of beat production and DJ culture, the duo’s love for the brooding guitar and string machine of The Cure or the hazy shoegazer meets Americana sound of Slowdive/Mojave 3 and Mazzy Star — and even classic rock acts of their youth like Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd — never waned, and Lum was still a guitarist at his core.
“Ryan’s an emotive guitarist, so many of my lyrics were conceived while listening to him play, just allowing my mind to verbalize how his melodies made me feel. I don’t have the classical ‘Heavenly Voices’ style that epitomized his early work; I’d say I bring a more earthy element to the songs,” confides Bee, who in the interim between Lovespirals LPs released a solo album co-produced by Lum, centered on her more popular online musical collaborations including the title track, “Love Me Leave Me .”
Closing in on two decades together, there’s understandably a good deal of highs and lows to pull from lyrically, as well as musically. While early album single, “Heartstrings” — a poppy upbeat retro trip-hop tune punctuated by bluesy electric guitar — celebrates the exhilaration of creative fusion, the darkly atmospheric “Will It Ever Be The Same” speaks to the anxiety of growing apart and losing connection. The mysterious and sensual Twins-esque “Are You Lonely” paints a portrait of desire in the digital age, with the sense of hope and futility as inextricably linked as binary code. The beautifully devastating ethereal rock of “Dark Night Of The Soul” bemoans the complete loss of self during a difficult life transition, while “It’s Alright” merely shrugs its shoulders over the daily grind, elevating complacency to mantric anthem with it’s soaring guitar and vocal work. As Bee succinctly muses in the masterfully soulful and melancholic title track, “Life goes on.”
A lot has happened in the 8 years since ‘Future Past,’ most notably the creation of the duo’s YouTube channel, Happy Healthy Vegan. With a 200K plus subscriber base, the show has brought awareness to the band’s other passion, Veganism, while also creating a new fanbase for their music. While these new listeners are largely unaware of Lum’s earlier band incarnation, his history with Projekt Records, or his struggles with pre-digital musical technology, but they’re sure to be as enchanted as those who’ve followed the band’s triple decade spanning evolution only to see it cycle back around to it’s dreamiest, darkest, most ethereal guitar and voice centered style. As Lum points out, “I could have never made an album as sonically sublime as this back in the day. As to how it compares to Cocteau Twins, I’ll have to leave that up to the listener.”