Leon Frear is a Chicago-based singer songwriter who has made a striking debut album, recorded in isolation in his own home studio, taking years to complete. Using the painstaking process of laying down tracks by playing all the instruments, this care and attention can be felt in the clever arrangements and interesting textures on many of the tracks.
There is wry, dark, observational humour at play in many of the lyrics, which are often self-deprecatory in tone. An excellent visual representation of this can be seen in the excellent animated video for the first single from the album, Secret Second Moon:
Frear’s vocal style is clearly influenced by Leonard Cohen, and that’s one he freely acknowledges – world-weary, often half-spoken and even whispered in places. I hear in him too one of my favourite vocal stylists from this side of the Atlantic – Aidan Moffat from Arab Strap. Frear has the same 3am confessional tone as Moffat, usually admitting to some romantic liaison which has gone awry for all the wrong reasons.
Frear’s musical accompaniment to all this leavens any feelings of melancholia. There may be grief and sadness running through some of these songs but you don’t come away feeling down, such is the quality of the songs. There are jangly guitars and strong hooks on many of the tracks plus evocative female vocals as a counterpoint on ‘A Morning Waltz’ and ‘A Murder of Crows’ (a nice gothic thread to some of the titles too). The closing two tracks, ‘Sweet Dreams Say Goodbye’ and ‘Drowning Horses’ feature a pleasingly crunchier guitar sound, the album rocking out at its end, perhaps pointing to band performances in a live setting for these songs, which they certainly deserve.
