Love, Lust & Other Wreckage” is a semi-autobiographical album of thirteen songs that John Vento has released with MTS Records. The album also serves as a soundtrack for the self-titled musical, written by award-winning playwright Amy Hartman.
The result of two years of work, the album deals with the topic of a person’s struggle with true intimacy in relationships. This is a record full of regrets and anguish, but that eventually finds love and serenity.
The fact it features introspective lyrics, wonderful melodies, creative arrangements, and meticulous instrumental work would already make “Love, Lust & Other Wreckage” worth listening.
But there is more.
This album stands out most of all thanks to Vento’s ability to entice the listener to share his emotional state. There’s a kind of mutual sharing going on, one that attracts you inside those intimate emotional surroundings. With the same ease of a conversation with a trusty confidant, the songs glide wonderfully from a topic to the next, track after track
“Love, Lust & Other Wreckage” is an intense and strongly focused listening experience that shows Vento’s great talent in putting himself under the listener’s scrutiny. All this takes place over a lush organic background, one that’s as musically convincing as emotionally penetrating. Epic and sprawling, this album unfolds through themes of hope, loss, and love and its many disguises.
In “Love, Lust & Other Wreckage” we find all the technical and life experience of someone who’s been making music for years.
Only if you have ten years of recording career behind you, can you have such a profound mastery of your creativity.
Only if you can count on a solid core of collaborators −one that boasts names like John Randall Fox, Buddy Hall, Tim Hadley, Frank Ferraro, and Amy Hartman− you can achieve a production of this level.
Only if you are the Pittsburgh chameleon, you can create “Love, Lust & Other Wreckage.”