“Remember the first time you heard the Suitcase Junket on the radio…his songwriting is extraordinary…This is one of the most exciting records I’ve heard in years.”
– Vin Scelsa of Idiot’s Delight on WFUV and Sirius/XM
“Not everyone can pull off the one-man-band gambit without lapsing into schtick, but Amherst’s Matt Lorenz has it all down to an art[…]the songs are what you remember.”
-The Boston Globe
Matt Lorenz – a Vermont born musician, visual artist and tinkerer, is a professional showoff. “I aim to write good songs and sing them honestly,” says Lorenz. He does that and more. The Suitcase Junket’s artistic vision is one of salvaged and repurposed objects, images and emotions. His innovative junk-percussion constructions, original album art featuring inanimate objects with wings, and the high craft of his songwriting all combine to create a unique and engaging entity with a force and style all its own. Lorenz’s self-taught throat-singing adds a fascinating edge to the overall sound. “I’m interested in the hidden voices that reside within things: the songs stuck inside instruments, the story behind the object, the mysterious weight of a word, the harmonic sequence that’s in every note waiting to be broken as light through a prism.”
Lorenz tours The Suitcase Junket nationally playing on festival stages and city street corners, in concert halls and dive bars, in living rooms and listening rooms. The sound isn’t easy to pin into a genre, but The Suitcase Junket is often likened to Tom Waits, The Black Keys and Andrew Bird. Lorenz’s songwriting is unexpected, powerful and poignant, drawing from the deep well of the American musical traditions of folk, rock, blues and storytelling, all sharpened with a keen pop sensibility. With masterful command over instruments of his own creation, he silences a room with the first notes of his throat singing and holds the crowd until the final chords of his guitar. When he plays you get the sense that he is truly playing and that he’d be doing it just as joyfully with or without an audience.
Lorenz has released three albums as The Suitcase Junket Sever and Lift (2009) and Knock It Down (2011) and Make Time (2015). “The band” is built around a resurrected dumpster-diamond guitar, an old oversized suitcase, a hi-hat, a gas-can baby-shoe foot-drum, a cookpot-soupcan-tambourine foot-drum, a circular-saw-blade bell and a box of bones and silverware that operate much like a hi-hat. He pounds out rhythms with his feet and his twang-and-buzz guitar growls through a couple of old tube amps. On top of all this is the ethereal edge of his overtone throat-singing. This act is unique and not to be missed.
