Electric Saints

Lucius Vein has spent his career behaving as if rock music were outlawed by a church he personally founded.

Part glam prophet, part gothic frontman and part man who has brought his own wind machine to a pub function, Lucius emerged from the violet smoke with a band built for spectacle. Their songs combine hard-rock riffs, cathedral keyboards, theatrical vocals and enough electrical activity to make the venue manager inspect the insurance policy.

Electric Saints is the album on which the pageantry finally becomes a world of its own. The guitars shine like sharpened chrome. The rhythm section marches rather than grooves. Choirs rise behind Lucius as he delivers every line as though addressing the final survivors from the roof of a burning chapel.

The record’s central idea is gloriously excessive: holiness rebuilt through distortion, sinners canonised by amplifier and desire treated as a minor supernatural event. Lucius sings of ruined angels, midnight conversions and doomed lovers with names that sound expensive to engrave.

Yet the album works because there are real songs beneath the candles. The choruses are immediate, the riffs are muscular and the quieter passages reveal a surprisingly wounded voice beneath the pose. Lucius may enter wearing enough jewellery to disrupt an airport, but he understands loneliness. He simply refuses to experience it without stage lighting.

The production balances old-school hard-rock weight with a dark, modern sheen. Synths flicker like failing stained glass, drums strike with ceremonial force and the solos arrive exactly when a lesser artist would consider restraint.

MERINGUE! met Lucius in a room containing fourteen unlit candles.

We asked whether he considered himself a religious man.

“Religions consider themselves Lucius men,” he replied.

One candle lit itself. We chose not to expense lunch.