Luxury's The Latest and the Greatest: A Tribute to a Neglected Rock Album

Luxury's The Latest and the Greatest was recorded in 1996 after recovery from a tour-van accident that had seemed likely to claim the lives of some band members (as told in Parallel Love, an excellent documentary about the band). The album has all the beauty and pathos of their other albums, but in concentrated form. In a decade of grunge and punk, they put the energy of drums and soaring guitars together with clear and pensive vocals for a sound that was upset and hopeful at once. As such the album 'holds up', which is to say it resisted being frozen in time either by the banality of timeless pop or the immediacy of mere reaction. It gets at the universal via the particular. It is itself. It is very good. 

When I picked up this album in 1997 I was full of the angst and worry which so frustrated my generation's confidence and conviction. As I sat in my dank basement bedroom with false-wood paneling, alone and troubled and wishing I could bust out and find myself, when I put on The Latest and the Greatest it felt like the album listened to me. But somehow it channeled that solidarity and helped me pivot to wonder.

10 songs and 44 minutes long, The Latest and the Greatest starts up with a brooding drum-scape that soon gives way to a bombastic burst of drums and guitar and a lyric about "revolution". The title track strikes an immediate nerve. But once the chorus kicks in and the band is singing "we're the greatest, the world should know that by now", we get the sense there might be some satire here. After brilliant instrumental breaks in the second and third minutes of the song, we hear "life is more than being sexy, and if you learn that, well you learned that from me." Somehow we're having our desire for revolution stoked, exposed as arrogance, and then channeled into something more patient and mundane. That's song one.

Song two From the Lion Within seems to carry on the satire. Back then I could just sense that this band had grown up in trailers like I did, because there just was no way they meant it when they sang "Now that you are free, be what you will be, and have the wonderful world of luxury." Beginning the song with a declaration of intent to "move your soul as well as I am able" seemed to me like a mockery of the worship music scene as well. In any case, the song continues the bracing energy of track one. The guitars and bass and drums are layered with complexity, which is part of why the album rewards decades of listening. There's a lot there. (Incidentally, there's a guitar riff at the three minute mark which I always thought U2 ripped off for Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me--but that song came out in 1995, so I don't know who would win that court case if there was one. If based on song quality, Luxury would sweep the jury.)

The third track Not So Grand mellows out in a hard-plodding guitar riff with melodic vocals over top, but once the chorus hits, the drums and guitar are soaring again and the lyrics are nothing short of arresting. "Am I a lover of being a failure, or just a failure at being a lover?" And then the back-handed slap to society: "No, I have never / Never even changed the world / Though I've been told one thousand times I should want to / But no one has asked me to." If there's better Gen X poetry I haven't heard it. But the song doesn't leave it at that. It also asks "am I too much like Voltaire's Candide?"--which is a remarkable line given the near death trauma the band had just come through. It's a reference to a satirical 18th century novel wherein Candide has been taught by his age to respond to recurring tragedies with the optimist's refrain that "this is the best of all possible worlds", but by the end comes to the more quotidian conclusion that "we must cultivate our garden". 

If that song sits well with the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible, the next one seems to have been prophetic. In Metropolitan, beautiful vocals disguise lyrics that are as pointedly scathing of consumerist free-market self-actualization as any of the best punk music of the 70s and 80s. "Love yourself and / Go for the gusto / America raised me, don't you know?" Back then we kids new the jig was up. What was more singable than "If this is the modern world why do I feel so very out of place?" and the outro "The future looks so bright ahead / But I wonder / Will everyone be dead?"

The follow up in track five, The Glory, is incredible. "These pearls of mine / Unknown to all the swine / These pearls of mine / I can see the greed on everyone's mind / And so I'll wait and hesitate / Carry on a little more time / Just to be wise." Growing up in the Boomer generations' shadow it felt like we'd have to wait a long time for our shot, and when we finally got it it was likely to be exploited. This song struck a chord. As the song laments "the glory" over and over it seems to say: look, be wise how you cast your pearls, but let's not kid ourselves, clutching after them is a fools game. "Be wise."

To my ears now, Red Mascara seems problematically to project the foolishness of lust onto the "pretty girl with dark red lipstick", but the magic spell of seduction is a potent force and the song does well to call the bluff and hold out for something more than the shallow "I love yous" mentioned in verse three. At the same time, against the prudish backdrop of the Christian music scene at that time, this song also felt a bit like it was celebrating of the electric current of attraction that otherwise felt out of bounds.

King Me is slow and melodic, with clean electric guitar picking over a methodical drum beat. We hear "Isn't life meant to be lived and loved, and / Isn't life meant to be lived and loved, and / Isn't life meant to never grow old?" Somehow it catches the melancholy fear of trouble in the throat and says dammit let's get on with living and loving anyway. We were the Dead Poets Society generation after all. 

It's followed by Hell or Highwater, which feels like a companion song both in the sense of its sound and its lyrics, which channels that desire to live and love into an ode to the promise of abiding friendship. Before many of us had yet read about the socially-constructed nature of identity, we learned it from this song's final line, almost like a prayer: "please don't betray me and let me forget / who I am, who I am, who I am." This stoked a longing in me back then, for which I think I owe Luxury a debt of gratitude.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an epic which laments helplessness, treasures lost, and the chaotic passage of time, but builds into a climactic burst of energy that gratefully receives caged birdsong as the defiance to hold on to life. Against the backdrop of happy-clappy optimism this echo of Voltaire's Candide is even more explicitly an ode to the determined witness of African Americans, as expressed by novelist Maya Angelou and poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, the source of the title line.

With the last song The Pearls, we're led by a slow strum and plinking high piano notes to imagine ourselves as pearls who are held from the swine of death's "terrible sea", to taste the fountain of immortality. If it weren't for the songs that went before it it might sound a bit like "I'll Fly Away" escapism, except the pearls that are held fast are the treasures of this life, not some escapist fantasy. The whole thing seems like the denouement to the line from Caged Bird which said "somehow God is good and God is loving". That somehow is perhaps the most devout lyric I've ever sung along to, precisely because it doesn't come up with any explanation, it just goes for it, honestly and achingly, with all the gusto of a late 90s rock band we've hardly heard the likes of since.

For all these ten reasons and more, even though it isn't their latest anymore, I suggest that The Latest and the Greatest may not only be Luxury's best, but unironically one of the great rock albums of our time.