My Review: Leech - Sapperlot

 Leech - Sapperlot

The sky in the vicinity of Strengelbach, in the canton of Argovia, is a conscious witness to energy flows full of abstention and gentle melodic exercises emanating from the Swiss quintet who, with their latest work, have indulged in a navigation among the clouds, in a continuous union between the essence of music that pilots dreams and the indecent ghosts of reality.

Emotion triumphs over physicality immersed in the abstract and the concept chasing the sums of beauty, in which contamination is a contemplative arrow that sticks to experimentation, in the funnel of bewilderment the sense of loss acquires sensuality and otherworldly existence converges in a state of suspension.

The five manipulate twenty-eight years of their career to synthesise the mighty post-rock imprinting and head towards a mammoth forest filled with colourful ambient flowers and into a pop full of attractive peaks that change the look of their path. Here, their art is transformed into a seductive embrace made of luminous signals that change the past into a present that is no longer hypnotic and cadenced, but into a tangle of magic that kisses the beat with riffs less adjacent to sadness and a more evident use of keyboards, piano, vibraphones, to make subtle the pain of a chaos that in these seven tracks is evident, as a question and not as an answer to the daily sonic bustle.

It climbs the mountain, with a pragmatic propensity to find two situations for each song: a loop on which the whole becomes mutant adjacency, and a second moment in which the change of rhythm, real or apparent, changes chords and perceptions. This is an atypical stratagem for making a concept album, not in terms of subject matter (no, do not make the mistake of thinking that an instrumental album cannot also be a sound concept...), but thanks to the arithmetical construction that becomes a kite capable of dragging the impulses towards the sense of emptiness that is forced to take a path of filling, it succeeds in realising desire.

When poetry does not need words, then one is left dumbfounded, defrauded of one's (stupid) habits, and one runs the risk of learning that there is a shortcut to mental flexibility from these seven tracks.

In the game of visions, everything shrinks because the Swiss band exploits the obsession with detail, with repetition, in a pirate race to find the bare minimum, to make listening a silk dummy, in a day in which what arrives is an avalanche, substantially slow, and therefore even more raw and swaggering.

The post-rock of the beginnings remains an intuition, a necessity that reduces the impact towards perdition, but, in this balsamic jewel, it acts as a shoulder and does not play the main role, to nourish a swirling aspiration of stylistic schemes that are now saturated, amidst repetitions that every musical genre tends to experience.

Surprise, renewal, new paths that fill the roads of listening towards a slow-motion storm, in which one's destiny is to write, in one's mind, a story that sees us defeated with honour

Sapperlot is a secret challenge to life, no photos, little cinema, a few projections, just a slow cup of coffee that enters the heart, leaving an aphonic taste, a shiver of fear and dismay, with vitaminic caresses that take us back to the time when music was a carnage, given the sum of emotions that one underwent, without being able to oppose. And that is what happens in this context: the hourglass slips, everything becomes unhinged, and a nuclear lucidity explodes our spasms.

Leech's rock is an anaesthesia, a pleasurable deception, a visceral protest against breathlessness and a rational cure for the exaggerations of a music industry that no longer cultivates the virgin beauty of magic.

It is not clear where this group's aptitude for surprising the coveted spaces of bewilderment, of loss, in a quasi-silence that operates in frequencies in close contact with the assimilation of direct, straightforward perspective games, never inhabited by naivety, comes from. One cries while smiling, dreams while walking, makes love while trembling, and heads into the periphery of time, with the gift of losing it altogether.

In this symbiosis of musical styles and genres, nothing is vacant, and the melody, once conferred by the intersections of guitars full of salt and pepper, now prefers to give the keyboard the lead, to make the sunbeams of these soft frustrations warmer, in a kiss between banks full of water and torment. An orchestra that seems to include all 540 musical instruments, in the apotheosis that brings heaven to its knees.

Urs Meyer as always takes his six-string and walks through the nettles, Marcel Meyer does the same, but also uses keyboards. Serge Olan plays the drums as if to make us touch the vibration of time, in a continuous clap to Olympus. David Hofmann plays playmaker, distributing his talent between bass, guitars and keyboard. Alessandro Giannelli sits on a stool to illuminate the harmony with keyboard, vibraphone and moving to beat soft drums.  They are silent knights of a solemnity that unsettles, entering into our babbling contortions, dispensing pills of wisdom, uttering a single word throughout the album: Love...

And it is precisely love from which the idea comes, the concept of a minimalist atonement that induces the listener to reflect on the meaning of an unequal relationship: these are songs that muffle, allowing absolutely no disclosure of what the ribcage is experiencing.

Haunting is the search for a production capable of healing the modern anomaly that no longer sees it as an integral part of a path of construction. Here, instead, we witness a compact pact of alliances and projections.

And it is shock, which clings to the hope that the record does not end, as in every relationship health and illness become accomplices in a celestial project: they are notes that descend to fly in the water, in the scorching summer of existence, where the heat makes joy dry. 

Second after second, the areas of obscene amateurism are hit, with a maturity exam whose importance the Old Scribe is certain will not be understood: with a job like this one becomes a gnome in the circus of the flying eagles, without a beak, without food but with the belly of the eyes full...

It is time to patrol these alleys: fasten your seatbelts and drink a glass of red wine, for in the slowness of flavour lives the secret of every spark of intelligence...

Song by Song

1 - Knock Knock 

Knock Knock is a shock: sparks of Marilyn Manson's Beautiful People seem to confiscate an entire career but it's only a moment, just be patient and you'll notice how the fat, distorted notes combine with the hypnotic strategy of the keyboards and piano to legitimise the flight of a boulder...

2 - Rotor Heart

Again, a dense initial sound, and then the rhythm takes a run on the shoulders, with the bass scratching the trails of the sky and the vertical entrance of the keyboards swinging the sensation that a cherry tree has abandoned stability to become a footprint of light. The drumming paints the trajectory, the keyboard sounds like a saxophone on a cloudless day and the breath becomes the prison of a dream with no more feathers...

3 - Crown Me With Whisper

A hypnotic dance of thought disguises itself, in the atmospheric circle of a keyboard surrounding the asphalt, in a subtle approach to dramatic visions typical of western music, to test the approach to ambient and world music, allowing the slowness to be a sponge, where the dramas of the clouds reach our senses. The drumming is a march that seems to lead the guitars to sleep on the side of a road without walls...

4 - Pick A Cloud 

Nyman and Sakamoto, united even if in two different dimensions, take notes in the first few seconds of the track, and then it's a flashy, old-fashioned mnemonic game of what post-rock was in its early days, a rhythmic dilemma that can't shake off the breath of pulsating melodic radioactivity: a few notes may be enough to make the face shine

5 - Starmina

The rhythm slows down, but the sense of loss increases, of yearning that glides in a zone where the notes seem to be waiting: not for an explosion, but for a subdued, peaceful and silent escape. Instead, no: everything becomes a mystery and, as in a Bergman film, the precipice seems a pleasant place to render the stars mute. A music box of the senses that becomes heavier, strengthened by a guitar that scratches away at the skin, slowly.

6 - Alfonso's Night

What is the wind made of? What is its ideal speed? Where would he like to go and what prevents him from reaching his goal? Ask Alfonso's Night: in this multifaceted gem we surely find the mystery enshrined, in a psychological session where hypnosis is provided by a rummaging through the veins of a minimised but screaming emotion... It cries with obsession and gravity, in a cylinder that seems to be waiting for the rhythmic trajectory that arrives when Serge stamps his foot on the bass drum and the sounds become more sibilant. A strategic moment that reminds us of Peter Gabriel's song in the film Birdy , when he manages to fly and it is evident that it happens here too: we are all birds in a flight full of celestial sadness...

7 - Everything Will Be The Same

Struggling against destiny, man's stubborn will to repeat every nonsense is highlighted by this sepulchral litany, the summa of the entire work: one shrugs, dismayed, one finds sonic glitter that seems like caresses before the corpse of existence. Love remains. Pronounced. Described with this axion that makes the electrical circuits of the brain in anxious anticipation, a farewell that cannot be stopped. The track shows more variety than the other six in that it must accommodate a series of goodbyes, of farewells, a liquid embrace that courageously brings us back to the condition of understanding that what we have heard is a spectacular flight of feathers abandoned forever to their beauty... And in this tear their music sits down to kiss us, in the time of a fellowship that will have made us all fortunate living beings...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

10 August 2024

https://leechofficial.bandcamp.com/merch/sapperlot-vinyl-lp

On Bandcamp will be available on 13/12/2024