Luggage: Hand Is Bad

It’s always a good year when FACS, Protomartyr and Activity release new music. However, add Luggage to the fold, and suddenly the year just gets a little better than just good.

It’s a plausible argument to suggest that Luggage are the most underrated act on the planet. The Chicago three-piece, vocalist/guitarist Michael Vallera, bassist Michael John Grant and drummer Luca Cimarusti, are, in fact, go beyond any orbit considered post. They are, in fact post-post. A band dialled in with a unique, codified telepathy.

Whether it be their scintillating three-pronged attack that started with the 2016 debut, Sun, the following Three (2017) and its follow-up Shift (2019) or their 2021 mini-LP, Happiness, listening to a Luggage record is like lighting coursing through your veins. There’s a hypnotic energy that throws you off balance, proving difficult to define. It’s here deep within the ambiguity where the true beauty is found.

Luggage are on of those artists that provide that ultimate bridge to cross, whether it’s the idea or a distinguished sound vibration. Luggage combines both, taking unimaginable turns into what many others would consider blind alleys.

Grain: We’ll Hide Away: Complete Recordings 1993-1995

Not Luggage. It’s what they don’t say in where the answers are found, and with smoke-filled rhythms that both revel and absorb the darkness, the Chicago three-piece conjure up menacing atmospheres that turn on a dime during their latest release, Hand Is Bad.

From spatial to savage within the blink of an eye, Luggage unfurl the kind of brooding undercurrents that shift the landscapes on which Hand Is Bad is built. It’s wonderfully incongruous and unique, pulling together the remnants of past releases and reaffirming their position as one of the true behemoths of guitar-based music.

The eponymous opening track permeates through a poisonous mist. With dread-like chugs and eerie build-ups that oscillate between quiet and loud, it’s a song that simply aims to hunt you down.

Unlike Circled, an instrumental that is like gold dust falling from another orbit. Think of The Mark Of Cain at half-speed, hooping with the kind of wayward sonics that have you spiraling out of control.

“You put your head back / It was a dream I had” Vallera mumbles on Sunshine in your Teeth – abstract post-rock that fills the void left by Slint and early-era Tortoise. With a title that sounds more like a chapter from a children’s book, Beautiful Truck is where post-hardcore overshadows punk (“This is this space/ Cut through”). So too on Mirror It; both tracks lumbering, rust belt majesty stirring up the embers of dread.

FACS: Still Life In Decay

It continues on River, which sees Luggage on a search and destroy mission. Tension that builds, and although you expect the song to explode and fill the night sky with a sordid array of colours, it never comes. Sonically, that is where Luggage stand on their own. There’s never a need to seek out drama through sound: it’s already there.

With Ends and The Poison Ends, Luggage walks the same perilous paths as fellow Chicago act and kindred spirits, FACS. Compositions that slowly evolve from hours of being locked in the groove until that moment of freedom arrives.

Which is the the polar opposite to Deep North. Inspired by black pits of despair, imagine the dungeon wave of Bodies On Everest and outer-world wanderings of The For Carnation. Eerie sonics that stretch the mind to dark places. It feeds into closing cut, Nowhere. Perhaps the most straightforward track on Hand Is Bad, and while the track may stumble across the same frequencies as your standard fare post-punk troupe, fear not. Luggage do it better in a post-everything kind of way.

This is music made by lifers for lifers, and in a world that degrades artistic expression more and more as each day passes, bands like Luggage and albums like Hand Is Bad remind us that the struggle is worth it.

Hand Is Bad is out now via Amish Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.