St. Lenox

Ten Songs About Memory & Hope/ Ten Hymns from My St. Lenox

Both of St. Lenox's albums together on one CD. "Ten Songs About Memory and Hope, the Anyway Records album debut of New York's St. Lenox, is Choi's singularly thrilling mix of pop- song craftsmanship, atmospheric electro kicks, rich singing, jazz freedom, and, yes, karaoke. All of this, rendered with charisma to burn, is precisely what you hear on an energetic St. Lenox track like "I Still Dream of the '90s, " which colors the recent past with current longings for flying cars, or "Just Friends, " a fluidly melodic mid-tempo ballad that insists that pop-soul lives in 2013. For St. Lenox, emotion starts, although doesn't end, with Choi's voice, an agile tenor with an undewy top-end glow. His voice is, at any rate, one reason why songs such as "That Old Time Religion" and "Bitter Pill" occupy a listener's memory long after the tracks finish." Ten Hymns From My American Gothic is a sprawling, layered, stream-of-consciousness portrait of modern American life, presented by St. Lenox as a gift to his father, who immigrated to the United States, in honor of his 70th birthday. Written, performed and recorded by the writer in off hours, while working as an attorney in Manhattan, the album meditates on progressive themes, immigration, cultural divide, forgiveness and manifest destiny.