“Go Back Home,” with its bluesy acoustic framework spiked by sleek slide guitar, suggests a marriage between Led Zeppelin III and Let It Bleed. Likewise, the title tune’s jangly invocations and wistful choruses speak to his instincts as a pop classicist. Opening track “Out of My Mind,” with its brash power chords and anthemic vibe, subtly conjures vintage Who, while “Last of the Twilight Girls” has a Radio City-worthy opening riff and a succinct-yet-meaty solo to remind listeners of Keene’s prowess as a lead guitarist. To that end, Laugh in the Dark sounds utterly unrestricted while still remaining true to Keene’s lifelong inspirations. Hence you have a direct concoction of the Beatles meet the Who by way of Big Star, with a little Stones for good measure.” In fact, I didn’t even worry at all about songs, melodies, etc., that might borrow too obviously from my main muses.
“Somehow, making the covers album freed me up to not be so overly hypersensitive as to my influences. Indeed, Keene cites the experience of doing an entire album’s worth of others’ material as being key to that “fresh slate” - and possibly even opening up some creative avenues to explore. I started with a completely fresh slate on this one.” But all the songs on Laugh in the Dark were started and finished last year from April through October. What I've done in the past before starting to write for a new record would be to demo a cover or resurrect an old song of mine that I liked but never made the final cut for an album. As he explains, “There were always songs left over from the last project or ideas that hadn’t been fleshed out.
Laugh in the Dark, while characterized as always by Keene’s distinctive flair for melodic guitar-driven rock and brawny power pop, marks a subtle shift in the artist’s songwriting modus operandi in that unlike previously, the material is all of recent vintage. The rock savant’s new offering, Laugh in the Dark, is the latest in a fruitful partnership with North Carolina’s Second Motion Records label, due out September 4, 2015, and comprises ten fresh Keene nuggets meticulously assembled over the course of six months, a period in which his “unobvious covers” record Excitement at Your Feet saw release to unanimous critical acclaim. Eleven full-lengths, four EPs, three compilations and one live album into the game, Tommy Keene is in the midst of a creative roll that, in the space of just six years, has yielded four studio albums - five, if you count 2010 career overview Tommy Keene You Hear Me: A Retrospective 1983-2009. The follow-up to acclaimed 2013 covers setįinds the veteran artist recharged and rocking.
4 via Second Motion on CD, 180-gram vinyl and digital,
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