Kiran Leonard has been quietly getting on with things for over a decade now, garnering endorsements from The Quietus, The Guardian and Pitchfork without ever bothering the ears of mainstream music fans. His talent as a writer and composer is something of an open secret; his releases are unanimously well-received by critics and peers – including bands like Black Country New Road, on whom he is an acknowledged influence – but he sticks doggedly to an admirable ethos of DIY experimentalism which perhaps precludes commercial success but makes for consistently excellent, compellingly multifaceted recordings.
Leonard’s go-to sound is a kind of orchestrated clatter, complex but freewheeling, and it is perfectly exemplified by the first moments of Real Home’s opening track, Pass Between Houses, where layers of percussion and noise give way to taut post-rock. It establishes the album as a distinctly urban piece of work, specifically a tangential ode to London. Leonard hails from Manchester but has recently settled in the capital, and Real Home explores, amongst other things, notions of place and belonging. The tense nature of his compositions and the stream-of-consciousness lyrics hold up a mirror to the alienating size and the stifling momentum of the city. Theatre For Change initially works from a folkier, gentler angle, recalling Jim O’Rourke, but soon builds into something spikier and more cathartic, while the title track advances on a flowing, wandering piano melody, with lyrics that attain an uncharacteristic clarity.
After a kind of country-pop interlude – Treat Me A Stranger – the album changes tack slightly. Utopia Of Bog uses the concept of rewilding to explore themes of decay and regeneration. From this point, the structure of the songs becomes more focussed and the percussion feels designed to drive home an idea. Leonard has acknowledged a change in his creative process: his new music is characterised by a kind of crystallisation which should not be confused with simplification. This is particularly observable on Void Attentive, where repetitive, minimalistic chords are offset by a subtle instrumental undertow.
Perhaps the album’s most interesting moment is provided by My Love, Let’s Take The Stage Tonight. Leonard’s influences here are the lyrical conventions of country and western and the poetry of William Carlos Williams and Arseny Tarkovsky, but the point isn’t to highlight some artificial juxtaposition of so-called high and low culture, but to prove that that kind of distinction is essentially unnecessary: the song functions perfectly well as a clever piece of pop music (it even has about it something of XTC, the masters of clever, boundary-pushing pop). Leonard’s experimental urges are indulged more fully in The Kiss, which builds from a muscular, David Grubbs-style electric guitar riff, through an exploratory, melodic vocal section full of sweet strings. There is a more percussive section, then a hypnotic, turbulent rain of overdubbed vocals before a gentler finale. The whole thing takes nearly ten minutes to unfold, ending with guest vocalist Magdalena McLean (of folky London post-rockers caroline), whose presence seems like the home towards which the song is travelling.
It’s only when the rangy closing track, He Had Always Led, condenses into a single note, and Leonard’s voice drops out of the mix for the last time, that you realise quite how much of a journey Real Home has been. It is an album of dizzying detail, delivered in a manner more open and accessible than pretty much anything in Leonard’s excellent back catalogue. It is spiky and literate and humane, and although it navigates some extraordinarily varied terrain, it never strays too far from its theme or from its ultimately melodic musical core. Real Home is an object lesson in combining experimental substance with accessible style.
Real Home is out 17th April 2024
Order: https://li.sten.to/kiranleonard