Words by Jason Lee. All photos from Luxtress’ Instagram page.
With a relentless beat to drive the song, Luxtress’s lyrics spill out on “Drug of Choice” barely keeping time with the rhythm. The lines “peel me off the pavement / and inflate my body” and “strung out / I can’t breathe without this / broken kind of love / my favorite kind of drug” cuts to the root of the tenuous thread that connects love to lust, loss to pain. Always adept at emotion and beautifully able to manipulate even the most bitter of hearts, rarely has Luxtress penned such a brutally truthful, painfully sensual song…
…and if you’re wondering whey the preceding sentence is italicized it’s because it’s plagiarized (!) but hey better than using AI cuz at least attribution can be given with the quote above lifted from Amy Hanson’s allmusic.com review of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” switching out only the name and song title plus switching out Bush’s lyrics for Luxtress’s obviously cuz while the two songs differ plenty in their surface details it feels as if they’re built from similar underlying DNA resulting in a Mobius strip of a song that’s like a goth-inflected strophic round like “Row Row Row Your Boat” performed in a minor key that’s doesn’t so much move from point A to point B as twist around itself in a tightening double-helix that’s all tension and little release, rising and falling from one plateau to another, with lyrics to match describing a seemingly unquenchable desire doggedly pursued all the same like running up that hill with no summit in sight or as Luxtress herself puts it…
…”this track was initially inspired by the Candyman soundtrack by Philip Glass, specifically the choirs in the intro. It’s a track I’ve been obsessed with a long time. I was playing around with samples of choirs chopping them up and layering with arpeggiated synths. I then ended up going in a different direction and layering guitars over that and making it into a kind of ballad with my friend Brayden Baird who is playing lead guitar on the track. I’ve been struggling with at time’s debilitating chronic health issues for three years and lyrically I think I was writing about my experience of using love or connection even at times in unhealthy ways to escape what feels like being dead or a ghost or feeling lost in life because of it”…
…and when it comes to the above-described art of making do, Philip Glass is famed as a composer adept at achieving maximum impact from minimal means in the form of “churning ostinatos, undulating arpeggios, and repeating rhythms that morph over various lengths of time atop broad fields of tonal harmony” while the original Clive Barker-inspired Candyman (1992) is a gothic ghost story itself a kind of double-helix formed from one strand urban legend-based folkloric horror and one strand social critique (if not always exactly progressive) of the horrors visited upon alternately neglected and exploited marginalized communities living in marginalized spaces with Luxtress likewise drawn to exploring how primal forces and human desires are intertwined with more socially-rooted struggles over power and resources, that is, assuming we’re not reading too much into the following brief biographical sketch kindly provided to us with all interpretations here and elsewhere being solely our own…
“Luxtress (Kelly Fioravante) crafts glittering electropop gems filtered through a fractured lens, drawing from the highs and lows of living on your own terms in an increasingly alienating world. After breaking into Portland’s underground scene in the late 2000s, she relocated to New York City and toured the US with her band Pony Farm before deciding to go solo. She now produces and performs her original songs totally on her own. Deeply personal yet intimately relatable, Luxtress’s songs are bold statements you can dance to. Inspirations include feminism, romance, David Lynch, and life under late-stage capitalism”…
…resulting in a ghostly yet seductive meditation stranded “somewhere between death and life” as the celestial choir of overdubbed voices phrases it in the song’s intro emerging in its opening moments like a storm forming on the horizon with a shimmering synth arpeggio tracing light trails like a comet’s tale with any implied weightlessness held in check by the insistent rhythms of the LinnDrum-ish drum machine driving the song inexorably forward with a lurching gait one moment and a steady, unwavering pulse the next, shadowed at every step by a conjoined baseline circling restlessly as if seeking out “some kind of relief […] some kind of freedom”…
…which it locates however fleetingly in the narrator’s drug of choice as represented sonically to our ears by layers of keening guitar and airy keyboards hinting at a stately pleasure dome just over the horizon which dissolves into the mist as the song rounds the next corner and starts building up again like a high-wire balancing act between lust and restraint as Luxtress’s voice finally begins to crack under the pressure as she pushes harder and harder against invisible constraints which is highly relatable innit even if you’re fortunate enough to not suffer from a debilitating health condition cuz we all need our drugs of choice to not feel dead inside sometimes and get us thru the next day or hour or minute whether that drug of choice is endless rounds of Wordle or sheer black satin girdles or maybe it’s chamomile tea or maybe it’s methamphetamines but whatever it happens to be rest assured The Deli is a judgement free zone…
“Rutherford” music video music video directed by Dylan Mars Greenberg
…meaning in other words here’s a song that is deeply haunted not just in having a bit of a spooky, ethereal vibe but in evoking more broadly a haunted age where appearances so frequently and so easily depart from reality assuming they can even still be distinguished with the constant recycling/reconfiguration of cultural artifacts creating a sort of time loop with past, present, and future sutured together in the digital domain with the resulting haunted aura perfectly epitomized by the fact of “Drug of Choice” is built around a Philip Glass sample that’s since been removed (or at least minimized, if we’re understanding correctly) with its ghostly presence living on at the heart of the song in absentia and even without this awareness the song seems to resonate to a frequency that feels just out of frame at and out of reach…
…which granted we don’t wanna go too far down a rabbit hole here but if we may close by quoting Mark Fisher at length a.k.a. “k-punk” (RIP) who was quite the insightful music blogger and author of tomes for our times like Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was fascinated by so-called “hypnagogic pop” (not his term) or in other words “sound [that] musters the sonic equivalent of the ‘corner of the retina’ effect that the best ghost stories have famously achieved” where it’s “not accidental that the word ‘haunting’ often refers to that which inhabits us but which we cannot ever grasp” and where “spectres are unsettling because they are that which can not, by their very nature (or lack of nature), ever be fully seen…only dwell[ing] at the periphery of the sensible in glimmers, shimmers, suggestions” which is not only good spooky fun but becomes extra relevant when one is pressed to ask “has there ever been a time when finding gaps in the seamless surfaces of ‘reality’ has ever felt more pressing?”…
…but let’s give the last word to Luxtress cuz we sure as heck ain’t trying to ghost the artist who created “Drug of Choice” in explaining the role that externally- and self-enforced absence plays in her current creative process: “It’s the first track I’ve released where I did a lot of the mixing myself which I’m proud of assisted by Brayden. Being in the studio is one of my favorite things in the world and I think mixing and audio engineering is a part of that for me since I can craft my own sound very specifically without having to try and explain it to another person so I keep practicing and trying to improve my skills in that area. Being sick has also changed how I do music, going to shows [and] playing shows takes a lot out of me sometimes but I can pace myself in the studio or work on music at home so I’ve become more of a studio musician than before when I was in bands and focused on playing shows and practicing all the time with others”…