Album Review: Andy Lucas - Weekend Millionaire (Crimp)

Cutting his musical teeth as a session musician and pianist throughout Scotland, singer-songwriter Andy Lucas steps out of the shadows to release his debut solo album WEEKEND MILLIONAIRE. Despite some pretty obvious influences, Lucas creates his own musical landscape, a landscape chock full of wry humour, witty lyricism and social observation.   

From the opening few bars of Birds, which sets out dangerously close to cocktail lounge music, but fortunately changes emphasis just in time to prevent my finger pressing the stop button, to the closing orchestral flurries of Burn, this debut feels astonishingly mature. Whilst the infectious title song has all the hallmarks of a memorable intelligent pop tune, the instrumental introduction to Talk of the Town tips its hat towards Classical arrangement, in a similar way to those of the late Rick Wright in some of his most memorable Floyd passages.    

If some of the songs owe an inescapable debt to Randy Newman, Einstein and the Taxi Driver for instance, which has all the irony of a pre-animated-movie-score-period Newman, then songs like The Miserable Musical Prostitute and Supergeeks probably owe more to the sort of ditty writing of the likes of Tim Minchin, with all their respective wordy wordly observations. Prozac employs a soulful late night jazz inflected groove impressively aided and abetted by Susie Palmer's backing vox.  

Helping out are Jamie Duffin playing a variety of instruments, Graeme McGeoch on violin, Callum McCann on guitar and Ruth Campbell on cello with some backing vocals courtesy of Susie Palmer and Esther O'Connor. The cherry on top of this musical feast though it has to be said, can be found in the uplifting string orchestrations, cleverly arranged by both Lucas and Duffin. There's every chance this would squeeze in nicely somewhere between your Randy's and your Ben Folds.