Grade: A+
The kids with their synths and hip producers, dragging the 1980s back: I wish they would stop. It was, in the main, an awful decade for music, the bands trite yet portentous, the stupid burbling bass guitars, hubris-stricken vocals and tinny drums. The kids retread all the dross. Yet if you were actually around and sentient in that avaricious decade, as was Saint
Leonard, you could find a certain chill beauty in hidden corners. Not the New Romantics, not Japan, not SAW. Just small niches here and there of inventiveness and clever pop.
Saint Leonard – Kieran Leonard to his mum – draws down all that was good about the cool side of the early 1980s: the motorik beats, the synths that were only three steps above a theremin, the primitive stuttered drums appropriated from Germany. You can find Cabaret Voltaire, Berlin-era Bowie and very early Ultravox within here. And the later part of the decade? David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti’s lush, minimalist, collaboration with Julee Cruise. Maybe a little debauched Gina X. The good stuff, in other words.
It helps, of course, that Saint Leonard can write a tune – both ‘Martini Symphony’ and ‘Threshold’ are simply great pop songs – but also has the confidence in his melodies to allow room for them to breathe, such as the Sprechgesang on the beautiful ‘The Florist’.
This is a lovely album, but it is too clever, too sincere, too knowing in its musical pedigree to grab the attention of the radio programmers. Which is, I think, a great shame. Because bad though the 1980s were for music, they were always better than naive retreads of Depeche bloody Mode and the scarifying Kylie.
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