It's been 12 years since Nick Lowe released a new album, but the venerated 75-year-old rock & roll sophisticate is back on his game with Indoor Safari. It's an album of clever, lovingly crafted tunes steeped in Fifties rockabilly and the early-Sixties British Invasion greats, sounds he's been channeling and reinventing since he was a leader of the U.K. pub-rock and punk scene in the mid-1970s. He sets the tone with "Went to a Party," an image of an older gentleman throwing on his suit and boldly leaving his house for a night out that sounds like it could've been on Kinda Kinks in 1965. He's having a great time, dancing till quarter to four, chatting up his fellow revelers "'round a waterhole of Campari." He even gets recognized by a fan — which is awesome, even though the music scholar mistakes Nick for a different beloved, white-haired punk-era musician, Robyn Hitchcock. Oh, well, life happens. It's signature Lowe: lovingly retro-rock delivered with joy, wit, and good-natured irony.
He's always been one of music's good eggs. Lowe got his start in the late-Sixties with Brinsley Schwarz, who were a little like the Band doing power pop. In the mid-Seventies, he became a U.K. star with sharp, warm, wickedly catchy hits like "Cruel to Be Kind" and "So It Goes," and produced early albums by Elvis Costello and Graham Parker, who shared his music's mix of punk spirit and traditional singer-songwriter craft. But where Parker and Costello were angry young men updating Dylanesque spite, Lowe always seemed more bemused than pissed off, even when he was singing "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass," from his great 1978 album, Jesus of Cool. It says something that Costello's most beloved song is a version of Lowe's generously questioning protest plea "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love and Understanding." His output over the years has been intermittent. He did time in the tasteful supergroups Rockpile and Little Village, and hit a high point with 1990's Party of One, where he delivered the perfectly rhymed, "Do you remember Rick Astley?/He had a big fat hit, it was ghastly." His more recent records, like 2007's At My Age and 2011's The Old Magic, have had a lived-in intimacy and a low-key, sometimes downcast tone.
A few years ago, he hooked up with Los Straitjackets, a surf-rock band from Nashville who perform in Mexican wrestling masks. They back him here as well, and Lowe sounds feisty and enlivened. Indoor Safari comes with the admonition: "This record must be played at 33 1/3 r.p.m. on equipment especially designed for stereophonic records incorporating a stereophonic pick-up and twin-channel amplifier feeding into two loudspeakers." But it isn't old-man cranky like that at all; its knowingly kitschy cover is a better representation of the record's playful, self-aware spirit.
Lowe channels the ebullient, wiry sounds of Sun Records, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Ricky Nelson, and the early British Invasion, and bends them to fit his own story. Songs like "Jet Pac Boomerang" and "Tokyo Baby" are novelty bangers that rock too hard to feel like jokes. On "Raincoat in the River," his rough-around-the-edges singing adds a hint of resilience to the song's rugged rockabilly chug and carefree lyrics.
Lowe gives all his throwback gestures a personal touch. "Love Starvation" is teenager-in-love desolation told from the perspective of a guy who catches himself in the mirror and wonders, "If only I could turn back the clock." The wonderfully bright "Crying Inside" cuts even deeper; the song is so good you wonder if it might be a Fifties hit you didn't know, until you catch him dropping intimations of mortality like "Pretty soon I’m gonna slip away." The sense that there's something real and human going on beneath what could just be fun nostalgia gives the record it's soul, adding more emotional weight to the jangly sadness of "Blue on Blue" or "Different Kind of Blue."
It makes the album's happier moments all the more fun. On "Lay It on Me Baby," he skips down the street with his hat to the side, savoring a sunny day as the guitars ring out and swell up around him, carrying him to the next party or heartache or whatever it might be. Let's just hope he stays on it and makes a few more records like this one. Indoor Safari sounds like he's having the time of his life.
