Close Search Close

Categories

 

  • Comics
  • Theatre
  • Site News

 

Support Us

Music

The Sounding Board

Courting's new album sounds like a million in prizes

by Ben Hohenstatt on March 18, 2025

A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.

Lust for Life, Or: How To Thread The Needle And Come Out The Other Side To Tell The Story

Every Tuesday, the Sounding Board is a space for a short-ish review of a recent-ish release and conversations about new-to-you music. We’ll get things started with a write-up about a newer, likely under-heard album, and invite you to share your music musings in the comments.1

The title did not inspire confidence.

When Courting announced they would follow up 2024’s thoroughly delightful New Last Name with an album called Lust for Life, Or: How To Thread The Needle And Come Out The Other Side To Tell The Story,2 I was reasonably confident that the Liverpool quartet were about to let loose their version of Father John Misty’s Pure Comedy or Arcade Fire’s We.3 A ponderous, possibly high-concept, and almost certainly exhausting listening experience seemed imminent. Album artwork that played up the duality implied by the album’s double title and discussion of a mirrored-song structure didn’t change that impression.4

But I was deceived, for another excellent Courting album was made. Lust for Life’s unwieldy title belies a tighter and possibly even better LP than its predecessor. In fact, with just eight songs — including two that function as an extended intro for the album — it’d be a super-sized EP if it wasn’t for the 6:27 title track that appears near the end of the album.5 Most importantly, Courting seem to have assembled an album from the best bits of every song you remember from the early-to-mid-’00s, irrespective of genre. Elements of dance-punk, Auto-Tuned crooning, smooth, early-Maroon-5-style adult contemporary, moody instrumentals, and even electronica are present on the album.

These disparate sounds aren’t blended so much as stitched together Frankenstein-style. Despite the sometimes audible seams connecting the upcycled pieces, they still work well together. Pre-release single “Pause at You,” is a great example of the phenomenon and a great choice for an early single: it’s the catchiest song on Lust for Life. It starts as a perfect recreation of DFA Records disco-set spleen-venting before hitting a massive pop-punk chorus that includes a wink to the lustful lacerater whose 1977 album inspired the title.6 The processing on Murphy-O’Neill’s vocals make the stitching between verse and chorus extra apparent. On the verses, it sounds like his voice was run through some kind of condenser amp — think the first Strokes album — while it’s bedazzled with Auto-Tune on the choruses. It‘s a bold choice, but it’s the weightless warble it adds to Murphy-O’Neill’s voice that’s interesting.

While striking, the use of Auto-Tune isn’t new territory for Courting, and its at times gratuitous presence on New Last Name was polarizing.7 Lust for Life deploys it far less frequently than its predecessors; the robo-vocals seem to be taking a break on most songs. There’s still usually some sort of studio manipulation on Murphy-O’Neill’s vocals, but it’s most often the kind that’s generally accepted in guitar-based music, making lyrics sound like they’re being delivered off-mic and from another decade.

And make no mistake, Lust for Life is most definitely a guitar-based album, no matter how often other genres and complex orchestrations crowd in. Thank Joshua Cope, who does great work across the album, whether it’s the moody shimmer of “After You,” the more frenetic fretwork on “Likely Place for Them to Be,” or the genre-bending maximalism of “Lust for Life.” That rock-leaning approach also gives the rhythm section a chance to flex, with bassist Connor McCann carrying the buoyant “Namcy” and drummer Sean Thomas capably bashing out whatever tempo is asked of him. If that sounds like damning with faint praise, if even half of the percussion sounds on “Stealth Rollback” are man-made, Thomas must have done some serious cardio training.

Lyrically, Lust for Life is right in Courting’s wheelhouse. A torrent of cheeky wordplay and references runs through the album even when emotions run high. The line between insufferable schmaltz and effecting earnestness is razor-thin. Whether referencing Cutting Crew and coining “kisserable,” (as in, “you’re oh so kisserable”) falls on the right side of that line is truly going to vary by listener, but the sense of humor about young-adult melodrama is appreciated. Just like the gentle undercurrent of saxophone on “Eleven Sent (This Time)” or the swelling strings that show up on multiple songs, the sometimes goofy lyrics are one more twist that makes Lust for Life a Courting album, and more fun than it would have been with any other band’s name on the cover.

  1. The “likely” in “likely underheard” is doing a heavy lift this week: I think this was a pretty anticipated release. ↩︎
  2. Yes, capitalized exactly like that — Ed. ↩︎
  3. These albums have their defenders, but I’m not generally among them. Pure Comedy is basically the pop music equivalent of a latter-day Scorsese flick. There are great moments and quality performances, but it’s also an opaque meditation on some of life’s biggest questions that could’ve used more editing. I try not to pan things because there’s many people who are cleverer and angrier than me who are happy to do it, so I’m not writing anything about We. ↩︎
  4. The twos stuff is both a little heady and a little silly, so I’m going to defer to the description vocalist Sean Murphy-O’Neil offered up to The Line of Best Fit: “Two titles, artwork in two colours, which features two figures, and has eight tracks, all set up with a twin structure. The opening track is mirrored by the closer, ‘Likely place,’ with the same looping motif played first with strings, then with a sharp electric guitar buzz.” ↩︎
  5. At nine tracks, New Last Name is far from bloated, but every single one of those songs was longer than three minutes, with six songs reaching past the four-minute mark. For a pop-rock album, it feels like a sprawling epic. ↩︎
  6. The chorus for “Pause At You” plays with the “street-walking cheetah” line from Iggy’s “Search and Destroy”: ”I see you sometimes with a glass eye/You only see me with the lights down/See you around/I always see you around/Streetwalking cheater in the nighttime.” ↩︎
  7. I was a fan, but it was an inevitable focus of a lot of the online discussion of the album. Here’s someone tactfully asking about it during an AMA. ↩︎

Categories

 

  • Comics
  • Theatre
  • Site News

 

Support Us

© 2024 - — Media Magpies. All rights reserved. | RSS