The New York, USA-based band Luscious Jackson enjoyed almost universal press acclaim in the 90s with their spacious, bass-driven hip-hop/rock crossover. Their sound sampled New York life first-hand, with breakbeats married to traffic noise and overheard conversation, coupled with a slouching bass and guitar that managed to effect a Brooklyn drawl of its own. They were actually most heavily influenced by UK bands such as Delta 5, the Slits and Gang Of Four. Thus inspired, Jill Cunniff (b. 17 August 1966; vocals/bass), Gabrielle Glaser (vocals/guitar) and Kate Schellenbach (b. 5 January 1966, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA; drums) used to forge ID to get into Manhattan’s Lower East Side’s punk clubs, as a result of which Schellenbach was recruited as drummer by the Beastie Boys, in their original hardcore guise. Having worked on their first two EP releases, Polly Wog Stew and Cooky Puss, she later drummed with Hippies With Guns before rejoining her old friends. However, the trio then went off to separate art schools (Cunniff and Glaser also formed a punk band, Jaws, in San Francisco, and Cunniff edited the fanzines Decline of Art and The Golfing Experience).
The members returned to New York in 1991, and Cunniff and Glaser began to write short sketches, songs and rhymes together, recruiting Cunniff’s art school friend, the classically trained musician Vivian Trimble, to add keyboards for their first shows. With a guitar and beatbox as their musical foundation, they added primal but amusing sampling on their first demo tape. Old friend Mike D heard it and was impressed enough to release it, virtually unchanged, as the band’s 1992 debut mini-album on the Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal label. Many were impressed by their erudite wit, displayed both in the songs themselves and in the choice of samples. Natural Ingredients was more reserved musically, but was just as barbed lyrically, concentrating on nostalgia, romance and relationships: ‘A lot of the lyrics on this record are about coming to terms with womanhood and the search for the identity and confusion that women tend to experience in adolescence or in long-term relationships’ - not that the band made it sound as prosaic as that, with their clever use of irresistible harmonies and low-slung bass on the fine track ‘Energy Sucker’ and promotional single ‘Deep Shag’.
The Daniel Lanois -produced third album tempered the band’s aggression with more relaxed grooves, and featured backing vocals from Emmylou Harris on ‘Soothe Yourself’. The prolific Cunniff and Trimble also recorded an album as Kostars, but the latter left the main band before the release of 1999’s Electric Honey. The remaining trio announced that the band had officially broken up the following March. A reunion was announced in 2006 with the members returning to the studio to record new material. Cunniff and Glaser both released solo albums the following year.
