You know you’re listening to a good album when, halfway through the first song, you’re already compiling a mental list of people who need to know about it. And when you find out that the music coming through your speakers is almost two years old, yet sounds refreshingly new…well, you know you’ve stumbled upon some musicians worth remembering.
Hailing from Vancouver, British Columbia, Trevor and Matt Chan (aka The Chan Brothers) are the two pieces that make up the production whole known as No Luck Club. “We started off as radio DJs first…in the college radio scene,” explains Trevor. “We’ve been doing that forever—since high school. That’s where we were exposed to all these different forms of music.” A decade of voracious record-collecting for these weekly shows, coupled with Matt’s mid-’90s club-DJ gigs, has blessed the pair with an eclectic spectrum of music genres and sound bites that range from instructional records to radio dramas to comedy albums. In 1999, the brothers decided to ante up and rearrange full-time, resulting in the mix demo CD that, with some finesse, would become their eventual debut.
Turntablism in general is hard to define, but No Luck Club’s sample-heavy sound has been compared to that of Kid Koala and RJD2. Think Cut Chemist meets the Dust Brothers. (Dust Brothers did the production on the Beastie Boys album Paul’s Boutique—arguably one of the most progressive hip-hop albums of its time.) “We tell people to check us out online because…we’re not really good at explaining what it is that we do,” laughs Trevor. “I throw on beats that we make, and Matt does his turntable stuff on top of it…. We’ve been working on our live show for the past year. [It’s] definitely a little different than a DJ set…maybe a hybrid of hip-hop and electronica.”
No Luck Club’s first record, Happiness, was originally scheduled for a 2001 debut on hip-hop super-producer Dan the Automator’s label, 75Ark Records. Unfortunately, the release date coincided with that of the label’s unfortunate demise. Had it not, you’d have heard of them by now. Maybe one of their tracks would have been featured in a snowboard video by Absinthe or Treetop Films. And this would be a review of their second album…put out by Ninja Tune, for that’s certainly the label on which it belongs.
Incidentally, though production hasn’t yet started on No Luck Club’s next album, Happiness is the first installment of a trilogy, thematically based loosely on the three Chinese gods of good luck: happiness, prosperity, and longevity. Until then, says Trevor, “I have two words: world tour!”
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Happiness is now finally enjoying the light of day courtesy of Ill Boogie Records, thus proving the adage that good things really do come to those who wait.
