Watched the documentary and it was indeed pretty interesting. Crazy that there's a working band out there featuring three Orthodox priests.
It made me dig up my Luxury discs I've had since the 90s, and they were a pretty great band indeed. Not sure why I didn't listen to them more at the time. They definitely made a mistake when signing with a Christian label, even one as progressive as Tooth & Nail was in the 90s. T&N seem to have dropped the ball with them - they managed to drum up attention at the time in mainstream outlets like
Option and
Alternative Press for MxPx, Starflyer 59, Danielson, Joy Electric, Velour 100, Morella's Forest and Joe Christmas, but I don't recall ever seeing a peep about Luxury in those mags, not even when they managed to land David Barbe as producer for their second album. But once they got dropped by Tooth & Nail, they dug their hole deeper by signing with another damn Christian label, but this time one without even the clout or mainstream credibility that Tooth & Nail had carved out for itself.
I don't remember there being any sort of hip Christian publication in the mid-90s where I would've read about them. The only rag up to that point that had ever embodied that particular oxymoron had been
Harvest Rock Syndicate, which had gone under a few years earlier. (Belated RIP Bryan Quincy Newcomb, who passed a couple of years ago.) But anyhow, I don't think Luxury got any sort of mainstream attention at all at the time, and if there were any Christian publications worth the bother, I wasn't aware of (or don't remember) them. The only reason I ever managed to discover Tooth & Nail in the first place was because every so often I'd wander into the Christian bookstore at the mall to see if there was anything new out that was Daniel Amos, the Choir, 77s or Adam Again related. One particular day there were none of those things, but there was a CD with a plain silver cover and a track listing of songs like "Second Space Song," "Hazel Would" and "The Zenith," so nothing that sounded like it would be irritatingly evangelical. I was in enough of a mood to spend money that I grabbed it, and was delighted to discover it was a shoegaze(!) album, and a damned great one at that, and after discovering Starflyer 59, I was willing to give most anything on Tooth & Nail in the 90s the benefit of the doubt.
Anyhow, I was completely unfamiliar with Luxury when I took a flyer on their first album - it was on Tooth & Nail and produced by Steve Hindalong of the Choir, two things which had definitely earned my trust by that point. I recall I picked
Amazing and Thankyou the same day I grabbed
Mercury by the Prayer Chain - another Hindalong production and on the shortlist for best buried treasure of the 90s. Two great albums that deserved a better fate than to have to be sought out in freaking Christian bookstores.
But why Tooth & Nail bailed on Luxury so quickly is a puzzler to me. The label was definitely trying to build up its credibility in the secular alt-rock arena, and Luxury should've been an easy sell. The documentary tries to chalk it up to the 1995 car wreck that left three people with broken necks, but the doc also shows that they were back performing live again six months after the wreck and it was only two years between their first and second albums, so the wreck really doesn't seem to have slowed any momentum that much. The band themselves chalk it up to T&N changing in a more pop punk direction, which is charitable on their part but not really supported by the facts - yes, MxPx's success led to T&N actively pursuing more pop punk acts, but at the same time they were making waves in hardcore/metalcore with bands like Zao and Training For Utopia, and I think it was in 97 that Danielson really started getting mainstream attention, with articles in
Option and interviews on NPR. Plus, Tooth & Nail didn't stop signing weirder, artier bands like MewithoutYou and Showbread. So I don't think it was any change in direction at T&N that caused them to drop Luxury.
Honestly, I think that Tooth & Nail just didn't realize exactly what Luxury was when they signed them after seeing one performance. In the documentary, label head Brandon Ebel plays down any notion that the label might've been a little freaked out by the band once they gave them a closer listen, but I dunno. Even though every member of the band seems to be hetero, Lee Bozeman's vocal delivery, stage presence and lyrics definitely leaned a lot closer to being queer-coded (at the very least, queer-friendly) than anything else sold through Christian bookstores in the 1990s. And while T&N were not bothered at all about releasing stuff like SF59 or Joe Christmas or myriad other albums with no religious content at all beyond "Thanks God!" in the credits, and would stick their neck out to release a Roadside Monument album with a lead-off track called "Sperm Ridden Burden", I have to wonder if after hearing Bozeman's Morrissey-isms on the first two Luxury albums, Ebel didn't just think to himself "Yknow, this band hasn't landed in fundamentalist crosshairs yet, and they likely won't sell enough albums to make it worth my time if/when they do. If the loonies are already raising a stink over a fairly harmless band like MxPx, they're going to lose their minds if they ever take notice of Luxury. I think we'd better quit with these guys while we're ahead."
Just a guess on my part, but at a time when Tooth & Nail were pretty aggressive in promoting their artists, for them to just barely acknowledge they had this band Luxury and then drop them after two albums, something seems a bit off.
