Purist, Eclectic Psychedelic Tunesmithing and Subtle Humor on Lorraine Leckie’s New Album

by delarue

Lorraine Leckie has been one of the few musicians to survive the devastation of the incredibly fertile rock scene that flourished in New York as late as the mid-zeros. It was a top-down assault on artistic communities. Encouraged by tax breaks, opportunitistic developers took the wrecking ball to working-class housing everywhere, and it wasn’t long before the giant sucking sound of an artistic brain- drain out of town ensued. Yet even under those dire circumstances, Leckie’s following grew, and the gigs got better and better, probably because she was one of the few still representing a gritty, punk-influenced Lower East Side sound.

But thta’s hardly the only sound she’s mined since then: her albums range from delicate, rainy-day acoustic songs, to icy, gothic Mitteleuropean art-rock and snarling Americana. Her latest album, Razor Wing Butterfly – streaming at Bandcamp – is her most psychedelic release to date.

Leckie’s skeletal, fingerpicked Telecaster explodes into a roar on the chorus in the opening track, Only Darkness, a parallel tale of a couple of noir archetypes seemingly doomed to their own separate worlds. Lead guitarist Hugh Pool channels dirty, evil, Crazy Horse Neil Young, violinist Pavel Cingl adding elegant washes and accents over the chugging rhythm section of Charles DeChants and drummer Keith Robinson

They follow the strutting, Stonesy Under the Vampire Moon with It Ain’t the Blues, which Pool introduces with a creepy approximation of a music box. There’s clever irony in the title because this is a blues – a vindictive, rampaging one.

Bristling with richly textured guitar multitracks, Genius in the Crowd is a shout-out to Leckie’s psychedelic rock pal Anton Newcomb of Brian Jonestown Massacre, her tender lyric contrasting with the guitar fury – and an interlude that’s too funny to give away.

Crickets, a stark, open-tuned acoustic ballad, has Britfolk tinges: it could be a John Renbourn or June Tabor song from the 60s spiced with spare electronic keys. The album’s funniest track is Mars Bar Baby, a tourists-eye view of one of New York’s most legendary dive bars. Again, the joke is too good to give away: if you know the old swing tune Moon Over Brooklyn, you’ll get it.

The Other Woman Is the Wind was inspired by a conversation Leckie had with a biker at the Sturgis motorcycle festival, a slow, swaying, Molly Hatchet-ish account of a guy addicted to the thrill of the raod.

Leckie follows with the album’s two best cuts, each of them a protest song. She wrote America Weeping in a rehearsal room with the band in the wake of the fateful 2016 Presidential election. It’s both a requiem for Leonard Cohen (a huge influence, who had died the night before) and an anguished cauldron of guitars. The title track perfectly captures the fury in the streets this summer, a growling yet hopeful anthem, Cingl contributing a tantalizingly brief, slashing coda.

Leckie switches to piano, slightly out of tune and awash in reverb, to wind up the album counterintuitively with the pensive vignette Why Oh Why. This album is probably the best introduction to Leckie’s music that exists so far. And for anyone who’s followed her regular Manhattan weekend residencies over the years, friom Banjo Jim’s, to Zirzamin and afterward, Leckie’s already substantial back catalog is dwarfed by the vast amount of material she’s written but hasn’t yet recorded: it’s reason to look forward to whatever this defiantly multistylistic tunesmith decides to put out next.