Love & Hate by Tomek

Love & Hate is a classic 1980s New York story—one that encompasses the downtown dance clubs, the uptown salsa scene, a rising jazz hero, and one of Manhattan’s most legendary recording studios, and that’s just for starters. At its center is a Polish émigré who left his Russian-occupied homeland for the kind of borderless, cross-cultural experiences that are only possible in a place like New York City.

Lamprecht laid down Love & Hate in A&R’s luxurious confines. “It was originally designed to have orchestras record soundtracks to movies,” remembers Lamprecht, “with 25-foot ceilings and huge movie screens.” Jazz trumpet/flugelhorn giant Tom Harrell, who was already starting to make a splash at the time, stands out among the handful of additional contributors, sliding snakelike into the galloping synth-funk of “I Gotta Fever” [sic], the slap-bass slow burner “Ambition,” and the salsa-meets-new wave wallop of “Life is Good.”

“God, Family and Country,” the album’s most overtly rocking track, expresses Lamprecht’s worries for his adopted home. “It was about the festering conservatism that was growing in the U.S. at the time,” he says. “Carter had just lost, and Reagan was elected...you had all those people professing to be patriotic and observant of family and country and God.”

The edgy “State of War” is the ideal soundtrack for those nail-biting days when the Cold War kept people up at night with visions of nuclear annihilation. It also displays Lamprecht’s mastery of minimalism: the only lyrics are the repeated title phrase, which grows in anxious intensity each time around.

Ultimately, Love & Hate is a tribute to the multicolored, many-sided muse that was New York City in the 1980s.

Kinda like a record company, except fun and run by music lovers.

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