Alex Lukashevsky

Deep Dark United have been a long-standing focus for respect and admiration within Toronto’s more adventurous music communities. Their constantly evolving shambles of sprawling sound careen about in all directions like a free jazz/rock pirouette set to spin off-kilter. On his own, DDU leader Alex Lukashevsky is an intensely intimate minstrel, accompanying himself on guitar, and adding only the sparsest of accompaniments (a little alto sax, clarinet, flute or lap steel where it’s necessary) to his head-spinning abstract impressions of love and torment with musical and lyrical poetry to spare. Often his songs rest so assuredly on such a reinforced logic of their own, they seem almost alien in their complexity, but there are lily pads of reference leading out to Lukashevsky’s pond, among them the finest of songwriting’s blessed outsider frontline — Captain Beefheart, Mayo Thompson, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, even Dredd Foole. Connexions isn’t the most accessible or embraceable album for fans of songs, but if you’ve got the time to penetrate and accept it for all its wondrous details, and perhaps possess at least a passing interest in the metaphysical, Alex Lukashevsky’s debut solo album might just reveal its beauties to you.