Few bands do lush and textured with as much authority as The Leisure Society. Marimbas, percussion and violins open the record before building up to a beautifully-orchestrated pastoral harmony-fest, propelled by strummed and picked guitars and banjos, and featuring old-fashioned ululating, heavily-reverbed female backing vocals.
What’s great about The Leisure Society in an age when the music industry thrives on elevator pitches and short-lived trends, is how unsullied by shtick they are. There’s no clear back-story or narrative to their melodic and arrangement choices (unless that story is the return of woodwind instruments to pop) – they’re not conveniently linked to Americana, British folk, eastern European polka music, chamber music, Springsteen or pop. If there was genre called simply, ‘good music’, they’d be in that section. Make sure you hear this.