The Last Town Chorus

Feature article (with interview), February 1, 2008. "A bewitching amalgam of earthbound heartache and otherwordly grandeur." Boston Globe. Read full article: PDF

Q&A With Megan, May 7, 2007. "I've got the social habits of a grandmother." New York Magazine. Read full interview: website

"The lap-steel solos are pure liquid metal—don’t be surprised if you see a bit of headbanging, albeit in slow motion, at this show." Time Out New York. Read full article: website

LIVE REVIEW BY JON PARELES - SXSW Music Conference in Austin, TX
"The Last Town Chorus, from New York City, revolves around Megan Hickey's breathy voice and her lap steel guitar. She uses it for twangs and slides, but the effect isn't downhome; it's closer to U2 than to Buck Owens. Accompanying her ballads with hovering, sustained tones and chords that can glide into the ether, the lap steel doesn't ground her in tradition. It suspends her voice amid longings and memories."
The New York Times, March 17, 2007. Read full article: website

ALBUM REVIEW - FOUR STARS **** (March 2007)
"The clear, gliding voice of Megan Hickey - who sings like a corn-fed Cocteau Twin - and the screams and exaltations of her lap steel...complement tales of snow, strawberry wine, and ninth-grade Smiths fandom"
SPIN Magazine, March 2007
READ FULL ARTICLE (with photo): PDF

SONGS YOU NEED TO DOWNLOAD NOW: The Last Town Chorus, "Boat" (February 2007)
"Megan Hickey's soothing, lap-steel version of David Bowie's "Modern Love" was featured on Grey's Anatomy, but this lyrical swoon is even more affecting. "
SPIN Magazine, February 2007
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LIVE REVIEW
"Hickey's majestic voice and fiery lap steel guitar-playing captivated the crowd from the onset..."
The Washington Post, February 7, 2007
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"An entrancing album."
ELLE Magazine, March 2007
Read full article (Photo features Megan's dog!): Image

"Like re-entering the real world from a subtitled art-house film on a Sunday afternoon, emerging from this album takes a lingering little while."
LA Weekly, March 8, 2007. Read full article: Web

"The Last Town Chorus’ aching lap-steel sound moves men to tears"
Chicago Tribune, January 2007
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"With achingly unsentimental ballads and slow, stinging blues, The Last Town Chorus strip down the music to focus on feeling evoked by a resonant note and a hypnotic tone"
Nashville Scene, January 25, 2007
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(UK's Largest Circulation Newspaper)
POP CD OF THE WEEK (4 Stars) - October 2006
"Beneath the soft surfaces, 'Wire Waltz' courses with the dark stuff: songs such as Foreign Land, Boat and You are expositions of souls racked by self-doubt, as much in torment as rapture. The title track is typical: its sparseness means every sound, every word, counts. And the funereal deconstruction of Bowie’s Modern Love is devastating."
The Sunday Times (UK) (October 2006)
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LIVE REVIEW OF LONDON PERFORMANCE - December, 2006
"You could have heard a pin drop. Which is just as well, for Megan Hickey's songs, and the way she delivers them, are as much about silences as they are about sound. The Pennsylvanian singer, centre stage on a chair, her lap steel guitar before her, ran through a set dominated by her band's stunning new album, Wire Waltz, but with satisfying larder raids on their debut's choicest cuts...Hickey worked the coo-and-pluck trick that has so entranced fans of her music -- a one-two that blurs the distinction between echoing, effects-laden country guitar and arcing, swooping voice to the point where they seem, at times, to take each other's parts...strange, dark magic..."
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Wire Waltz album review (four stars)
"Her unerring melodic ear and laid-back mastery is brilliantly showcased on this set of hairs-on-the-back-be-upstanding, personal tunes."
Daily Mirror (UK) (December 2006)
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"Quite beautiful" - Jonathan Ross, BBC Radio 2
"A stupendous album" - Mark Radcliffe, BBC Radio 2
"Absolutely gorgeous" - Bob Harris, BBC 2 Radio

"One of the albums of the year. Featuring gorgeously slow steel-guitar playing and vocals from Megan Hickey"
Daily Express (UK) (December 2006)
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Wire Waltz album review (4.5 stars)
"The Last Town Chorus is the vehicle for Megan's music - not exactly a band, but a revolving cast of musicians backing her utterly beguiling wares. Songs like 'Wire Waltz' and 'Wintering in Brooklyn' were shaped in a city landscape but squint into bright, wide American vistas. 'Huntsville, 1989,' sees her revisit junior high days without descending into over-sentimentality."
The Sun (UK) (October 2006) - Read full article: PDF

Feature/Interview with Megan about the cover of David Bowie's 'Modern Love' (includes photo of Megan's dog. Sailor)
"We loved The Last Town Chorus' album Wire Waltz so much we decided to find out more about singer Megan Hickey's sublime cover of David Bowie's Modern Love. The song is already gaining airplay in all the right places, watch for a single soon."
(December 2006) - Read full article: PDF

"Even before Hickey spellbinds listeners with her Gillian Welch-meets-Hope Sandoval voice, the sheer exclusivity of what you're seeing is enough to make you stop and gawk."
Paste Magazine (July 2005)
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"Don’t feel bad if you walk away a little slackjawed after seeing Last Town Chorus for the first time. It’s hard not to. The Brooklyn act is fronted by Megan Hickey, whose cover-girl looks fall completely out of context with her instrument of choice: lap steel (and a cheap, 60-year-old one at that). However unlikely the combination, Hickey is not just convincing, but utterly spellbinding as she sits at the lip of the stage, eyes closed, drenching her songs of heartbreak and city life with bottomless longing. “It just sounds like I feel,” she says of the lap steel, which she uses to send us floating in space or rolling down an endless big-sky highway. Her delay-rich style veers into both avant Americana and the ethereal, recalling Beth Orton and Hope Sandoval. It’s an unlikely path for a Pittsburgh girl who grew up on the likes of Yaz and Erasure (she’s even recorded glacial covers of Bowie’s “Modern Love” and Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.”). A former bandmate introduced her to the lap steel a few years ago, and her life hasn’t been the same since: “It was like magic in my living room.”
Relix Magazine, US (August 2005)

"This highly seductive debut is set to spellbind a whole new set of languid disciples. Floating on the thawed-crystal voice and lap steel of songwriter Megan Hickey...the sound they make is a liquid tension of urban and rural, transplanted souls with an impossible longing for the best of both"
UNCUT, UK (January 2005)
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"The tension between the permanent and transitory, between belonging and leaving, marks the music as fundamentally urban. HIckey's lap steel conjures up street lights and Navy yards rather than dirt roads and front porches."
No Depression (July/August 2005)
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"Songs like 'Dear City' and 'Brooklyn Navy Yard, 1950' take urban vignettes and repaint them with the lilt and humidity or rural Americana: a pretty affecting feat"
Observer, UK (January 2, 2005)
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"Brooklyn's Megan Hickey is basking lately in the one-two-three punch of glorious praise overseas, coveted showcase gigs, and new material that kicks her ethereal music into grander, grittier gear. She sings like an angel and plays lap steel guitar like the Devil. Audio Narcotics."
Village Voice (March 2005)
Read a compilation of Village Voice press here: PDF

"Mesmerizing songs... Their debut album is a hypnotic wonder "
BBC Collective
Read full review here: website

"While too many local bands garner attention through attitude and looks, others, more discreet, fly below the radar. The Last Town Chorus is one of those others. Its music is quiet, and heavy on lap-steel guitar and twilight ambience. Fortunately for us, the listeners, this is a surer way to our hearts than to the cover of a magazine."
Time Out New York

"Hickey's lap steel decays and echoes, like it should be soundtracking a 4am scene at Times Square, yesterday's papers flying in slow-motion... The Last Town Chorus make glowing dream music...achieved through singer/guitarist Megan Hickey's love affair with a 1950s lap steel guitar: the instrument, usually a fleeting twang tacked on the end of a Gram Parsons chorus, that defines the band's sound...give them a bigger band (and they plan to tour with one), and watch the snowballing begin." February, 2005. Issue 307. (Review of debut album)
Record Collector, UK

"Hickey is blessed with a voice that fuses the authoritative jazz-inflections of Rickie Lee Jones with the heart-melting enchantment of Tara Jane ONeil or Chan Marshall at their most intimate. It's a disarming and enthralling blend...The Last Town Chorus have created a genre all their own."
Comes With A Smile (UK)

"Whatever your preconception of electric lap steel guitar, prepare to hear something new and haunting"
Americana UK
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"By drenching a staple instrument of Nashville backing bands in delay effects, the duo successfully recreates the rich pop ether of the great 4AD bands in an innovative and organic way"
Dusted Magazine
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"On the self-released 2003 debut from this Brooklyn act, front woman Megan Hickey repurposes the lap steel as a generator of urban noir. Backed most often by spare acoustic strumming, she sends the instrument, with its eerie sustain and liquid portamento, through a delay pedal to create an idiosyncratic shadow for her dry, dusky vocals. 'State Fair' and 'Change your Mind' are arresting full-fledged tunes, but Hickey's more inclined to sculpt milky little fragments that languidly drift and mutate. It's lovely stuff..."
Chicago Reader (June, 2005)

"Simply gorgeous"
Irene Trudel, WFMU

"Lush and poignant hymns on life that are at their core arresting in their beauty and divine in their simplicity"
Jenyk/dot/com
Read full live reviews: website