Nick Lowe, ‘Indoor Safari’: Album Review

For the past quarter century, Nick Lowe has quietly made some of the best albums of his five-decade recording career. Addressing age, lost love and the always-advancing steps of life moving on, the singer, songwriter and producer is just as sharp melodically and lyrically as he was when he made his two irrefutable classics, 1978’s Jesus of Cool and the following year’s Labour of Lust.

Now, though, Lowe has settled into the role of elder statesman, a new wave and power pop icon who looks back without much nostalgia, but with lessons learned, as he strides to the next stage of his life. Indoor Safari, his first album since 2013’s holiday offering Quality Street: A Seasonal Selection for All the Family, features backing by Los Straitjackets – the masked instrumental surf garage rock band from Nashville – and a dozen songs, some new, some pulled from his catalog to be retooled in new settings.

Lowe and Los Straitjackets have an easy chemistry, undoubtedly honed when the band backed him on a 2019 tour and a trio of EPs starting in 2018; several of the songs on those earlier records appear on Indoor Safari in newly recorded versions. At its loosest, such as in the opener “Went to a Party” and rockabilly throwback “Tokyo Bay,” the album breezes through its 37-minute playing time with few concessions to the 21st century. This is timeless music that could just as easily have been made 40 years ago.

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Like Lowe’s best work over the decades, Indoor Safari pulls from various stops, including new wave, pop, power pop, pub rock, Americana and traditional singer-songwriter music; Los Straitjackets bring other elements: garage, surf and classic rock ‘n’ roll. They also at times pull Lowe out of his recent self-reflection and into the more universal observations of his earlier records (“Went to a Party,” “Love Starvation”).

Indoor Safari mostly lifts the clouds that occasionally dampened Lowe’s aging spirit on 2007’s At My Age and 2011’s The Old Magic; however, they’re not quite shaken on the heartbroken “Different Kind of Blue” (first recorded during the sessions for 2001’s The Convincer) and “Blue on Blue.” “I’ve been wisecracking like the good old days, but pretty soon I’m going to slip away,” Lowe sings on “Crying Inside,” nodding to this uplift and ushering in a guitar solo with a casually cool “Here come the tears.” But as he sings at one point, “I’ll be back like a jet pac boomerang.” There’s no reason to doubt him.