released December 19, 2024

Artist: Lupa,
Label: Lupamusic,
LP Title : ANTIMOLOGY

1. Looking For You - ISRC: GB2MU1800001
Written by Antima Abbamonte & Carl Brecknell.
Produced, Arranged, Mixed by Antima Abbamonte & Bryan Corbett featuring Lupa: vocals, keys, synths, Bryan Corbett: programming, synths, Tom Livemore: e. guitars, Roger Inniss: six string fretted e. bass, Ian Palmer: drums.
© 1997 Antima Abbamonte / Carl Brecknell.
℗ 2024 Lupamusic.
® All Rights Reserved.

2. Something To Believe - ISRC: GB2MU1800002
Written by Antima Abbamonte.
Produced, Arranged, Mixed by Antima Abbamonte & Bryan Corbett featuring Lupa: vocals, Bryan Corbett: programming, Tom Livemore: e. guitars, Roger Inniss: fretless and six string fretted e. bass, Ian Palmer: drums.
© 2016 Antima Abbamonte.
℗ 2024 Lupamusic.
® All Rights Reserved.

3. Fever - ISRC: GB2MU1800004
Written by John Davenport / Eddie Cooley.
Produced, Arranged, Mixed by Antima Abbamonte & Bryan Corbett featuring Lupa: vocals, Bryan Corbett: flute, programming, keys, Tom Livemore: e. guitar, Tom Clarke- Hill: upright bass, Ian Palmer: drums.
© 1956 Hudson Bay Music Inc.
℗ 2024 Lupamusic.
® All Rights Reserved.

4. Like A Dream - ISRC: GB2MU1800005
Written by Antima Abbamonte
Produced, Arranged, Mixed by Antima Abbamonte & Bryan Corbett featuring Lupa: vocals, keys, synths, Bryan Corbett: programming, keys & synths, Tom Clarke-Hill: upright bass, Chris Bowden: tenor sax, Ian Palmer: drums.
© 1997 Antima Abbamonte
℗ 2024 Lupamusic.
® All Rights Reserved.

5. Touching Nothing - ISRC: GB2MU2400001
Written by Antima Abbamonte & Andrew Griffiths.
Produced, Arranged, Mixed by Antima Abbamonte & Bryan Corbett featuring Lupa: vocals & keys, Bryan Corbett: programming, Tom Livemore: e. guitars, Roger Inniss: fretless e. bass, Ian Palmer: drums.
© 1996 Antima Abbamonte / Andrew Griffiths
℗ 2024 Lupamusic
® All Rights Reserved.

6. Salvation - ISRC: GB2MU2200001
Written by Antima Abbamonte & Andrew Griffiths.
Produced, Arranged, Mixed by Antima Abbamonte & Bryan Corbett featuring Lupa: vocals, keys, Bryan Corbett: programming, trumpet, Tom Livemore: e. guitars, Roger Inniss: fretless e. bass, Ian Palmer: drums.
© 1996 Antima Abbamonte / Andrew Griffiths
℗ 2024 Lupamusic
® All Rights Reserved.

7. Woodstock - ISRC: GB2MU1800003
Written by Joni Mitchell.
Produced, Arranged, Mixed by Antima Abbamonte & Bryan Corbett featuring Lupa: vocals, percussive instruments, keys, Bryan Corbett: programming, keys, Chris Bowden: keys, alto sax, Roger Inniss: fretless & fretted six string e. bass, Ian Palmer: drums.
© 1969 Crazy Crow Music
℗ 2024 Lupamusic.
® All Rights Reserved.

All tracks recorded, produced, mixed & mastered for Lupamusic at The Peach House Studio Birmingham UK.

ALBUM REVIEW by Courtney Barrett: Antimology – by Lupa

Working from the premise ‘hope for the best, prepare for the worst’ of today’s hostile digital streaming climates towards the artist, about to embark on disseminating their endangered species publications to the world…it’s consumer would therefore click playback and have their ears discern whether the given album sinks or swims? – music’s digital age, thus, has rendered pretty much the five human senses to ears only exclusivity and into a sea of sameness where artists’ livelihood rely solely on an infinite number of streaming hits to bolster a misery planktonic payout income rate of 0.003 pence to the pound sterling.
Fortunately, Antimology artfully joins the sensory dots, benevolent in extent, the listeners’ ears transform to third-eye dimensions that enable psychedelic-kinaesthetic digests - in as much is appreciable via this album’s throwback inclusion of musicians’ credits - an ode to music’s vinyl-cassette-CD years. Alas, the consumer ears probe as to how this potentially great album-in-the-making is being brought about:
Well, the songs form a well-conceived thematic album unit of edgy love songs, with a single cover of Davenport & Cooley’s Fever, backed by robust musicianship, song arrangements and a startling studio album production. Lupa states the songs as personalised representations of the unravelling of her ‘wandering spirit and the map of her heart’, and her collective musicians’ interplay with such artisan command of the seven opuses they spring them to life in fullest colour spectrums of the song titles and subsequent imageries they each are conceptualised to be.
Much more can be deduced from the songs if the listener visualises Lupa’s notion of ‘desert’ mood-settings: indicative of stillness, restlessness, sobriety amidst racy, delusionary mirages – and the ABC colour-coded compositional building blocks brought in general terms to brilliant effect by the band’s architectural underscoring of predominantly slow to mid-tempo material, lending a heightened sense of yearning and ambivalent spirit. The lyric expression, ‘there’s no thrill, I feel the chill, love is gone’ from the LP opener, ‘Looking For You’, casts a soberest air summative contextually to both the heart-rendering of dissipated love and wider thematic resonance of the LP aligned to far ranging desertedness. Whereas good lyrics can always deliver to the consumer ear inquisition as a programme better informs the classical concert goer, it’s the impossible scopes of diversity within the compositional prosody, successfully crafted, here, by the accredited musicians, that extends the directive ear instead towards an improvisatory auditory intuition invigorated by second-sight: a detour from lazy pop conventions the ear expects to music enlightened by rolling-imagery and self-commentary of the given prose, e.g., ‘Something To Believe’ seems composed with a collective subliminal belonging that liberates the consumer to ‘listen with eyes’ and to self-reinterpret its lyrical meaning to gain greater autonomy reward or self-actualisation: the ear metamorphosed as the ‘singee-in-the-song’, to which extent Lupa’s irrepressible vocals, here, is so impressively dramatized and vivaciously pompous with presence, crooner-articulation, dynamism and range, it evokes Shakespeare, Keats or Wordsworth: Given a learned ear…’Something To Believe’, as, too , ‘Woodstock’ (Joni Mitchell) are foreseeable song classics!
Some final considerations on Antimology - it successfully works on several critical points: the collective songs forge a cohesive whole based on a conceptualised unity of love songs timeless in unidentifiable presence construction. The songs are mostly extended plays, as such are more compositions in the sense they are richly, and righteously, infused by orchestrated visionary and metaphoric story-linear that differentiates Pop conventions, in hierarchical sense: the material within can become classic alternative-pop songs. Antimology SINGS! each as passionate stand-alone tunes or as a three-dimensional kaleidoscopic LP. This centrality of the work is essentially crafted at the hands of musical mavericks: Lupa (LVs & BVs, Keys), Bryan Corbett (tr-fl-keys-programming), Chris Bowden (sax, keys), Tom Livemore (g), Roger Innis (b), Tom Clarke-Hill (U.Bass), Ian Palmer (d). The band have encyclopaedic sensibility in production of variable song styles and generic formats given live stage performance ambience in an otherwise studio-based recording setting: Pop, Rock, Jazz, Folk, Psychedelic-Soul. Lupa’s command of vox – leads and BVs harmony dominate both the musical fabric and productional sonic fields in attributes of control, flexibilty, intensity, and emotional and expressional delivery that establishes her as a uniquely interesting and talented artist and songwriter. Her signature glissandos and straight vocal tonality offer the ear inquisition treasure chests in mastery of how to pilot a vocal delivery and make it immovable as the songs’ compositional fabric chief component, or as heart-felt visionary on e.g. an exuberant pop song ‘Like A Dream’, with its rhythmically homogenous chordal staccatos at the choruses and searing saxophone contrapuntal combinations. The album production-arrangement-mixing attributed to Bryan Corbett and Lupa is quite phenomenal in essence it is independently produced, and endlessly memorable in improvisatory sense, lush-psychedelically soulical BVs, and meticulously chosen timbrel combinations; also, the enriching complementary songwriting team of Lupa-Carl Brecknell and Lupa-Andrew Griffiths on song lyrics exemplified on ‘Looking For You’ and Touching Nothing / Salvation, respectively. The sobriety-charged ‘Salvation’ ebbs away at the LP’s conceptualised starkness, scarcity and vastness of desert wilderness and its lyrical contents are overwhelmingly swamped in quicksand and oxygen-stifling, its relevance becomes an ode to Johnny Cash’s ‘Hurt’ or reminiscent of Tom Waits’ Chocolate Jesus’ and, instrumentally, the lyrical meaning is augmented by ensemble-driven picturesque story-telling – my personal ode to Lupa’s band!
In sum, it is hoped the sheer quality of Lupa’s Antimology LP and ear inquiry amounts to diligence in consumer ‘downloads over streams’ - representative, of course, earnestly of all artists inevitably enslaved to digital mainstreaming entities - to help right the injustices of artistic exploitative manipulations that hold a threateningly indefinite permanence as a creational and artistical monetary killjoy very much.

- Courtney Barrett