Tokyo Bay / Crying Inside

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Tokyo Bay, a four-song EP containing two originals and two covers, is the first studio recording Nick Lowe has released since the 2013 Christmas album Quality Street: A Seasonal Selection for All the Family and his first non-holiday music since 2011's The Old Magic. Perhaps more importantly, Tokyo Bay is the first new music Lowe has made since the 2017 passing of Neil Brockbank, the producer who helped steer his country-crooner comeback beginning with 1994's The Impossible Bird. Lowe headed into the studio with Los Straitjackets, who have been his supporting band since the promotional tour for Quality Street, and knocked out an EP anchored on "Tokyo Bay," a nifty rockabilly number he'd been playing in his set for the better part of a decade. Livelier and wilier in the studio than it is on-stage, "Tokyo Bay" marks a great return to rock & roll for Lowe, and it finds an easy companion in "Crying Inside," a shuffling little number that harks back to the days of Nick the Knife. A barreling version of "Travellin' Light," an old Cliff Richard chestnut, keeps the rock & roll flowing, but Lowe hasn't abandoned the exquisitely mellow after-hours music he's made his stock-in-trade during his third act: he refashions "Heartbreaker," a hit for Dionne Warwick written by the Bee Gees, into a torch song, one that would've easily slid onto The Convincer. There's not a bum track in the batch, and even if it whets the appetite for a full-length record in this vein, it's a pleasure to hear Lowe not only rock again, but open up a new phase in his career.

© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo