Leech - If We Get There One Day, Would You Please Open The Gates?
Drops of life on the hail of all tensions descend from the Alps, in the colourful Switzerland, like a working day to be extinguished only with the urgency of drawing a picture in which creativity is contained as a continuous response to the fascination of the richness of living on the one hand and on the other of a quiver that encompasses myriad expressions between grey and yellow, colours with an acid character but full of warmth, just watch closely.
The vinyl, 500 copies in a limited edition, hold the certainty of having the story of tears in your hands: the notes inside are discipline, a juxtaposition of modesty, a slow rush into mystery, a shaking of the glass of every fear to establish a new necessity. To listen to this album is to become gnomes, beautiful creatures to whom height does not prevent reality, anything but dreams! And so, as the music travels inside our bodies and into the hemisphere of emotions, we find ourselves tiny but erect, because Leech (the best Post-Rock band ever) are the masters of balance, sovereigns of the marvellous place where everything is the residence of pain transformed into respiratory intoxication, continuous.
And this fourth epochal sonic hatching is a resounding spite: you don't find room to discuss any approximations and mistakes, to scold or whatever. The band, born in Ofringen in the canton of Aargau, explodes their genuine propensity for sound architecture, overflowing, involving the listener in a lake of sweat, for an unexpected bath inside their veins. The old scribe writes while the tears advance towards the computer to precisely define the enormous beam of light that these ten compositions generate, in a delightful crossroads of enthusiasm, despair, silences, continuous shimmering and a sense of surrender, because this band draws on the stave a conspicuous ability to surpass dreams: one wants and demands many things from music, but listening to this record would be enough to silence selfishness.
Approaching an album of this genre of music already involves a great deal of effort in itself, increased by the fact that it is completely instrumental. In a world enveloped by the exaggerated need for words, we find here the mute ones, the extraordinary ones coming from instruments in heat, at once capable of limitless caresses.
Everything is structured to be a visual tale, a poem without voices except those of the soul coming out of the amplifiers and heading for the heart. A long tinkle, a ringing of life in the mountains that from Switzerland head towards our auditory apparatuses no longer dedicated to accepting certain stylistic modes that contemplate at least a little effort. The risk with this huge alpine picture is that we will hear the hustle and bustle of our bellies measuring our serious shortcomings: how much are we really willing to shrink?
Do you want to know better?
Wrong question: we are inside a film, a tale that meets the subtlest Philosophy, where the centre of gravity is the consistency of an uncommon feeling because we are in front of a unique mixture, more than just Post-Rock...
Guitars are corsairs, witches, sirens, nettles, slabs, wrinkles, crossbows, hares, firs on a windy day. They are corrosive atmospheric agents, they are the fever of the heart that finds peace and is capable of sustaining even war, with impetus and the will to go to extremes between Rock, Hard Rock, Progressive and Dreampop. Always present as a place of textures, melody and dreaming that also knows blizzards and mudslides.
The Bass is the Niesen, the Swiss Mountain that often disappears but, when you see it, with its triangular shape, you can only smile at it and thank it, because it knows how to be effective. Here, on the album, this precious instrument is the undisputed mainstay, with its changes of rhythm, for the way in which its notes seem to slide like a pebble down the glacier slope, for the way it directs the traffic of sonorous beauty with rigour and skill.
The Piano is a lion that yawns and kisses the notes with elegance and amazes with the way its every movement is able to give poetry and great cerebral pleasure: although not very heavy, it reveals its importance.
The Synthesiser is the vehicle that balances the effervescent compactness of the band by giving petals, blankets, carpets, flames, acid dreams, in total visibility to give different but perfectly sensible colours to the remarkable guitar textures.
The Drums are the Goddess of sense, the unique driver that is exterior and interior, the floater that welcomes the melody and swells it, educates it, bestowing wisdom through the advice of its sticks and pedals, in a continuous refreshment because this element not only steadies, but also amplifies the properties of notes that have come into the world to have the right rhythm.
Here their music becomes not only a perfectly designed landscape, but also a precious collector of smells and impressions, feelings, moods on a pilgrimage towards the incandescent meeting with the kiss of God. At times angular, like crumbling rocks, at others as gentle as the mating season between peaceful souls, the compositions are ultimately fairy tales with welded moods, with powerful arms and delicate hands, so that it is impossible to escape from the project of worker dragonflies on the back of poetry.
Nothing can be defined as a dilated electric digression, as it is necessary to qualify the discourse with a listening that captures the sparks composed of wind and hail particles that give the notes a sense of extraneousness with respect to, precisely, digressions. The Swiss immerse the intention and the pleasure of playing in the sea of possibilities, of joints, of streams of consciousness that have no pause even when the rhythm slows down: everything is imbued with the will to be fast, not to prevaricate, not to delude oneself that slowness is the twin sister of quality. They are fast inside, in their thoughts, in their limbs, which, together, sprint away towards the planet of magnificence. No longer music, nor literature, let alone photography, but dimensions outside the human in search of the eternal embrace, because these songs will never grow old...
Romantic, murderous, quiet and rebellious, Leech have reached the infinite: listening to this album is a bit like deluding yourself that you can follow them...
Avant-garde, theatre, cinema, photography, at times even a set of hints of a shy cabaret, make this the opening of the Post-Rock genre towards a horse that wants no reins, a pure virgin but free to muddle along at will. There are no suites, but we can smell the scent, and nothing resembles digressions, experiments of the moment in the sign of freedom, which is instead present in the textures of these clusters of light that, by mixing instruments, produce the nectar of the finest wine: a liquid with a hazy skin but a clear taste...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
15th February 2023
