Lake Street Dive plays slick retro R&B for the viral video generation
The title track of Lake Street Dive’s new album Side Pony represents everything appealing and confounding about the band. It’s an insidiously catchy song, with a sound somewhere between 1990s neo-soul and cocktail jazz, featuring lyrics that equate a quirky hairstyle with confidence and independence. It’s not hard to imagine “Side Pony” becoming a left-field hit—an “All About That Bass” for fans of R&B/roots-music revivalists. But if it breaks wide, what does that say about Lake Street Dive? That they can make an old-fashioned sound relevant to a modern audience? Or that they’re good at cranking out novelty numbers?
That anyone would even care enough to ask that question is a testament to how hard—and how smartly—the band has worked over the past five or six years. After spending the latter half of the ’00s gigging and recording intermittently, the quartet of New England Conservatory Of Music alums became a more serious ongoing project around 2010. The 2012 covers EP Fun Machine—and its popular promotional video of the foursome singing “I Want You Back” on a Boston street corner—drew enough notice to get lead singer Rachael Price to negotiate her way out of a solo contract with another label. Then in 2014 Lake Street Dive released the gritty, snappy album Bad Self Portraits, and around the same time took advantage of a series of big breaks: a Letterman TV spot, an appearance on the bill at an all-star Inside Llewyn Davis concert, and so on.
