Music Review: The Lostines, ‘Meet the Lostines’
The debut album from the New Orleans-based duo offers a unique and welcome twist on Americana.
Meet the Lostines album artwork. Risograph artwork by Adam Zee.
Some of the girl-group songs from the 1950s and ’60s evoke a feeling that’s hard to describe—utterly romantic and enchanting, but with a haunting, slightly disquieting effect. Something about the close harmonies and the echoey quality of the instrumentation can cause a tickle at the back of the neck. There’s a reason they work equally well in movies as romantic-montage accompaniments and terrifyingly cheerful backdrop to horror movies (The Chordettes’ “Mr. Sandman” comes to mind).
New Orleans duo The Lostines have captured that essence so perfectly, it’s almost disorienting. And yet, on their debut album, Meet the Lostines, which came out this past April, they’ve made it their own with their distinctive voices, modern country/Americana touches, and playful, imaginative songwriting.
The album opens with “A Tear,” a soaring but melancholy ballad whose roots can be traced back to The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” and the similarly retro “Full Moon Night.” But The Lostines soon reveal the versatility of their sound with the much more contemporary “Neon Lights.”
“After Party,” the fourth track, brings in a country flavor thanks in large part to a twangy pedal steel and fiddle parts. “Come Back to My Arms” delivers a classic doo-wop feel, while “Playing the Fool” has an infectious beach-blanket-bingo tempo. “Southwest Texas” somehow melds 1960s pop stylings with retro country melodies and background vocals; a fiddle trades solos with a keyboard, creating a surprising (and surprisingly good) friction of sounds.
The Lostines. Photo credit: Kait de Angelis.
The Lostines (as I suppose their name suggests) are fond of songs about lost love and being lost in memories of romantic moments, but they deviate from (or at least put a unique spin on) this theme from time to time, most notably on “No Mama Blues,” a story of child abandonment with dreamlike imagery that feels like the beginning of a fairy tale, and “Frankie & Eva,” an odd little strings-laden number, hovering somewhere between moody and campy, whose lyrics feature a conversation between (I kid you not) Frankenstein and the bride.
The album closes with one of the first Lostines tracks I ever heard and still one of my favorites, “Last Night,” a rapturous love song with vivid, hallucinatory lyrics; a swirling waltz rhythm; and sweet, ethereal harmonies.
Taken all together, Meet the Lostines is a one-in-a-million feast for the ears, sweet and dark, retro and modern, defying categorization and difficult to capture in words. It’s something that must be experienced. Whether you need a soundtrack for nostalgia, romance, or a spooky stroll through a graveyard, The Lostines are guaranteed to give you goosebumps.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is the primary writer, social media manager, podcast producer and event-calendar updater for Adventures in Americana. By day she’s a marketing writer/brand strategist. In addition to playing guitar and songwriting, she writes self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym T.A. Berkeley.
