Saint Leonard - The Golden Hour Review
Saint Leonard’s Golden Hour is deeply spiritual, artistically ambitious, and a feast for the senses.
Having a Berlin period is very good for musicians. Classic rock glories of the calibre of David Bowie and Iggy Pop have abundantly demonstrated it in the Seventies, and now it is the turn of Saint Leonard to produce the alternative Berlin record the 2020s didn’t know they needed. Partly due to artistic connection, but partly, possibly, to the atmosphere inherent in the Berlin underground, The Golden Hour, which was for a good portion recorded at the legendary Hansa Studios, has much to share both in form and in spirit with the work of those legends. Bowie in particular is a lingering presence throughout the record, in both a sonic and a subtler, more metaphysical way – transcending simple inspiration, there is a feeling that his work, and his work of the Berlin years particularly, was truly one of the conduits through which the ‘gift of sound and vision’ came to this album. There is, of course, material overlap also: The Red Book, one of the most monumental singles drawn from the album, is a collaboration with Brian Eno, and as such it is imbued with the same Eno-isms that contributed to shaping the sound of Bowie’s music circa Low. Trickles of the same sonic mindset permeate the record as a whole, particularly when synth sections push through to the forefront, such as in opening track Threshold, where the opening instrumental introduces an atmosphere which is half Always Crashing In The Same Car and half Twin Peaks.
Yet even with its obvious ties to the most classical of alternative rock, this is the exact opposite of a derivative record: there is a distinct feeling that no boundaries at all were imposed onto the songwriting (“trying to be avantgardly me”, the lyrics on Threshold announce, manifesto-like), and the album is, a result, in places almost reckless in its experimentation, doing things that should not work on paper but clearly do in the recording studio, playing with distortions to evoke an unsettling, almost otherworldly mood (see the aptly-titled Always Night, which also contains one of the sultriest bits of saxophone contemporary music has ever graced us with, or the hauntingly taut Tell Me The Truth, or even more so Wit’s End, which I unsettling in the best of ways and truly disruptive in its unexpected structure). There is a deep and uncompromising spirituality in Saint Leonard’s work which results in a musical effort to evoke a sense of Presence, which in turn pervades many of the tracks: Bells & Ecstasy, with its unusual sonorities and its almost disorienting depth, is perhaps the best example, but the same mood is found in less obvious places, such as the more melodic and stripped-down Martini Symphony, featuring some of the most compelling lyrics – and vocals – on the album.
Saint Leonard is a true polymath, but perhaps most of all he is a narrator – he has a novel out soon and his live shows have a noticeable streak of performance art to them, a deep awareness of the paradigm of the performing artist as a character – and true to that, The Golden Hour is an album that tells a story, or rather a handful of stories intertwined in a tight, and locally dark, tangle. There is a tale of self-discovery woven through with magick (rigorously with a k), but there is also a compelling narrative of the isolation and gloom of the lockdown years through which a significant part of the album was composed, and some of the most intense moments on the record are pure acts of storytelling (see for instance The Florist, which has something in its cabaret-style piano-and-spoken-word combination that tugs deeply at the heart). Throughout there is a feeling that this record is telling a story, and a story that is to be understood on a visceral, emotional level much more than on a purely intellectual one.
“Feel to feel, feel to love”, the lyrics repeat, almost like a mantra, on Feel to Feel, and therein lies perhaps the best key to the enjoyment and understanding of this record: first as a true feast for the senses in its texturally complex, titillatingly challenging composition, and then, on a deeper level, in its almost brutally honest depiction of the depths of feeling itself. Almost an antidote to the culture of casual listening that dominates the radio broadcasts of our time, this is an album that demands commitment from its listener: in order to fully appreciate it, and fully understand it, one must immerse themselves in the music completely, become part of the spell, and abandon thought in favour of pure feeling. This may be a challenge for music critics most of all, perhaps – the temptation to dissect and analyse is hard to abandon – but The Golden Hour remains a work of stark sincerity, which demands from its listener the courage of abandoning rationality, at least until the record is over. As with all leaps of faith, the rewards for this, too, are great.