Goodnight Company

Album Review

On her third album, San Diego-based singer/songwriter Jane Lui mixes a contemporary pop feel with aspects of classical, jazz, and show music in songs that reflect on love and loss. Like such peers as Kate Bush and Tori Amos, she displays a sophisticated musical background that she brings to bear on songs full of emotion, with the elaboration sometimes enhancing, and sometimes detracting from, the meaning. On "Take Me for Now," for example, which boasts half a dozen horns in a jazzy arrangement by Karl Soukup, the music supports the somewhat abrasive, kiss-off lyrics, giving Lui's bitchy tone a jaunty edge. Right afterwards, however, comes what seems to be the unintentionally funny "New Jersey," apparently sung by a woman expecting to reconnect with her lover in that far-off place on the East Coast, so far off that it may seem more a state of mind than a state. "I am ready for New Jersey," she declares, an odd sentiment to be sure, made even odder when a gospel choir joins in to repeat it soulfully. At such a moment, the album can seem overdone, as if the singer/songwriter is more interested in achieving production and arrangement effects than in rendering her songs most effectively. But then, those effects may be intended to cover up the weaknesses of the songs themselves, which could be more sharply written. Lui is actually most effective as a singer, investing her songs with an emotional fervor that puts them across whether or not the compositions or the studio gimmickry fully contribute. [The album was released on CD three months after it appeared digitally, accompanied by a DVD containing a "making of" film (a little longer than the musical content) that illuminated Lui and her producer Aaron Bowen's search for sonic perfection; appropriately, a photograph of Brian Wilson loomed on a wall throughout much of the proceedings.]