Review Summary: Luke Pickett is easy to describe...
Three things sum up Luke Pickett's debut EP 'For Every Petal Lost, Another Gained': he has an incredible voice, his sound/songwriting is unique and he has trouble not recycling his own material. Simply put, were his tendency to self-plagiarize any less prevalent, Luke Pickett would be an indisputable genius. Until, however, he finds a way to develop his talent into more than one direction, he may just be stuck making beautiful, sincere music -- not a bad gig, in itself.
Luke Pickett has one of those particular voices that is immediately familiar and unique all at once. His range is undoubtedly high enough to be theoretically grating, but it isn't; his voice is soothing, yet commanding enough to be allotted with any of his more renowned contemporaries. He has the range of Cedric Bixler-Zavala and the intonation of a less tone-deaf Dallas Green. He hits effeminate highs with his falsetto in 'Even In Heaven They Carry Switchblades' and he layers the *** out of his vocals in 'Empty Corridors', but never once does he exhaust the listener or have a misstep vocally. With an unparalleled sense of sincerity seeping through his voice, every second of each and every song oozes emotion; he is spotless vocalist.
Luke Pickett makes the type of music that (at least on this particular EP) could easily self-assign itself to a whole new genre: post-indie-pop. Each song, with the exception of 'See You at the Disco' (to a certain extent at least), builds itself up around haunting atmospheres and gradual climaxes and the average song length is an upward five minutes. A song will start with the surprisingly emotive strumming of Pickett, only to crescendo in a wave of pianos, electric guitars, reverb and powerful vocals. However, amidst the grandiosity of his compositions, his melodies are undoubtedly indie and his voice is undoubtedly poppy.
Luke Pickett surely has a deficiency with repetition. The careful climaxes he constructs appear in each and every song. The acoustic guitar that starts nearly every song is too often indistinguishable to be original and to benign to be laudable. His melodies - while being some of the best melodies ever created - are bent on reiterating themselves, as if he were held on gunpoint to create the same song six times in a row. Pickett does his best to sound hurt and sincere in each song (successfully, at that) but by the end of the half-an-hour long EP, his niche is milked dry and his charm has worn thin.
