Born and raised in Kansas, Alex Lowry is currently celebrating his one-year anniversary in New York City, and his third musical incarnation. Raised in a musical household, Lowry has fronted a straight-ahead punk
band (Dirty Steve), led an improvisation-based groove band (Lowry) and has in the past several years redefined himself as an excellent
singer/songwriter. His style does not lend itself easily to comparison.
Often employing irregular time signatures and airy, off-the-beaten-path chord voicings, Lowry paints vivid images with his unique voice solid and smooth while suggesting vulnerability. Alex recorded three albums with his band Lowry and is currently recording his first solo
album.

Alex Lowry, formerly of Dirty Steve, has cleaned up his act.
BY ANDREW MILLER
Andrew.Miller@pitch.com

Live, on the Paseo: Lowry takes its grooves to the street.

From the Week of Thursday, May 2, 2002

Nearly a decade before Alexander Lowry recorded Left My Car on the Paseo with the band that bears his surname, he fronted a Pittsburg, Kansas-based outfit called Dirty Steve. Singing, he says, about "punk bullshit, 'fuck you, rah rah rah,'" Lowry and his cohorts hacked pedestrian punk and metal riffs through the biggest amps that summer jobs and allowances could afford. It's a typical teen-age rite of passage, made astounding by Lowry's transformation into the amiable vocalist of a good-times jangle-jam quartet. Imagine Dave Matthews living his wonder years as a profane mohawked rabble-rouser, or, on a local level, an adolescent David Basse doing his best Iggy Pop impression in a greasy garage.
Today, Lowry doesn't preach about anarchy or rant about smashing the state -- in fact, he stays silent on nearly half of Paseo's tracks, letting the group's smooth, jazzy improvisation and rattlesnake percussion communicate his ideas. The only clues come from the song titles: "Voodoo Chile"-style wakka-wakka guitars speak of a "Relationship," polished guitar-and-bass passages shine from "Too Much Varnish," a gently melodic lead shouts "Whooh!" Though Lowry's musical message is now more mature than the simple sentiments he shared with Dirty Steve and Smokehouse, the blues-based outfit with whom he served refried standards between 1996 and 1998, not all listeners are able to interpret and appreciate his new songs' instrumental subtitles.

"A lot of crowds don't get what we're doing at all," Lowry admits. "We haven't gotten to the right audiences yet, but we're building up our fanbase little by little." To speed up this process, Lowry frontloaded Paseo with overwhelmingly upbeat numbers. After hooking ears with the opening title track, which pairs growly vocals that turn on into rrrron with stop-and-start bursts of slow-punching funk, Paseo gradually drifts away from accessibility, a voyage that ends with a jarring hidden cut that comes complete with a sampled conversation about martial law and a series of grotesquely juicy belches.

"That's [bassist] Mike Moellman," Lowry explains. "He does a lot of experimental stuff, recording random noise and friends when they're not paying attention." Moellman, a free-form jazz enthusiast, pushes the band's songs to extremes, while straightforward guitarist John Johnson, steady percussionist Bryan Winkert and Lowry keep them tethered to some sort of tangible structure.

Because of band members' steady grooves, which surface even in their most adventurous compositions, and sprawling song lengths, Lowry fares better with hippies than with hipsters. Lowry admits that "the jam crowd will move to what we do," but he balks at lumping the band in with that set, primarily for semantic reasons. "I really like the scene, but I don't really like the word 'jam,'" he says. "It limits what the music's trying to do, the open-mindedness of what it is." Also, Lowry's tunes, expansive by most standards, seem slim compared with the thirty-minute epics conjured by the jam circuit's leading lights. "We don't want to get stuck doing an endless boogie," Lowry says.

Lowry already has shared area stages with jam-masters the Samples as well as with links to neo-Deadhead royalty (Jerry Joseph, who has written songs for Widespread Panic, and Blueground Undergrass, who taught Phish all its pickin'-and-grinnin' tricks). Band members' dream gigs include the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey and Medeski, Martin & Wood, bands whose fans could be expected to understand instrumental-heavy sets. Lowry also names Paul Simon and Dave Matthews, hinting that there's a part of him that might like to inject a heavier singer/songwriter element into his band's approach.

"I have a library of words that I've never used," Lowry says. "But there's three other people in the group, so I have to find a nice medium." This wasn't always the case -- three years ago, Lowry the band was simply Lowry the man, with a bassist and later Winkert on hand to flesh out the tunes for his double-disc debut, Spent Movement. The group's sound has changed radically since that release, thanks to Lowry's enrollment in jazz classes at UMKC as well as to the influence of the band's new members.

At Lowry's CD release party for Paseo on Friday, May 3, at the Hurricane, the group will perform the album in its entirety as well as a good chunk of Spent Movement. A few covers will also be in the mix, including a funked-up version of Dave Brubeck's "Take Five." But just as the Foo Fighters don't crank out Nirvana hits, even given the immeasurable crowd-pleasing appeal of such a stunt, Lowry won't be digging into Dirty Steve's back catalog. "We sounded like shit," Lowry says of his early project, "but everyone thought it was cool back then."

Lowry
Spent Movement

It's a bold move to debut with a double album, but after eight years on the local scene, Alexander Lowry has released the epic Spent Movement, with each disc anchored by a 12-minute tune. Lowry often plays acoustic and electric guitar on the same song, constructing a dense layer of riffs, and he occasionally pitches in on the keys and percussion. His best efforts include "Jose," a breezy, jazzy number that tells an interesting story, and the bluesy "Love Dust," which uses some nice guitar work to overshadow its goofy lyrics. Less effective are "The Learning Song," which is plagued by an almost-obnoxious bass line, and the lyrics as a whole, which are riddled with confusing name-dropping and forced rhymes (the ants on the mound and the hound that's in the pound). In fact, although Lowry's vocals are decent, the songs are at their best when he's not singing, as during the extended jams that push "Aft" and "Spent Movement" past the 10-minute mark. With this mammoth effort, Lowry now has a substantial foundation of recorded material on which to build. Hopefully, it won't take eight more years for him to re-emerge, because he's quite capable of delivering a solid effort if he tightens his editing process and puts a little more emphasis on his blues roots.