What does mark the album out is a demented energy, it often feels like a twisted soundtrack to an old black and white slapstick short.
What does mark the album out is a demented energy, it often feels like a twisted soundtrack to an old black and white slapstick short.
How to describe the Leg? Dismantle their songs and lay out the components on your picnic blanket and it’d be a confusing old pile. Especially as they’ve dialled down the noisier guitar and feedback elements over successive records to where there’s almost none left.
Piece back together the individual bits: a hamfisted honky tonk piano here, a bit of slide guitar there, a drunken drawl of a vocal… and, if you made any sense out of it at all, you’d probably have the fractured outline of a bar-room folk band. But that would be missing the more stately formal skills, the occasional bit of downbeat beauty, the handclap beats and the sheer overall oddness of what going on.
What does mark the album out is a demented energy, it often feels like a twisted soundtrack to an old black and white slapstick short. But its humour is way bleaker than that. It recalls a bit the Butthole Surfers. Not so much in sound (although…), but in the way they imbue their whimsy with a genuine sense of threat. And in how they manage to wring real but unfathomable pathos from the least expected places.
Which really doesn’t properly describe the Leg. So you’ll just have to listen to them, won’t you?
Matt originally failed to do justice to the Leg over on www.soundsxp.com