If your first exposure to UK artist, Benjamin Francis Leftwich, was his new album, Gratitude, you may be surprised to learn that Leftwich is considered an “indie folk” artist.
But listening back to his previous two albums, the designation starts to make a little more sense, and his career’s stylistic trajectory comes into greater focus.
As you listen to Leftwich’s 2011 debut album, Last Smoke Before the Storm, he oozes indie-folk. His lovely low tenor is straight out of the (imaginary) “Elliot Smith Style Guide for Indie Folk Vocalists.” It’s all gentle, double-tracked breathiness. Five years later, he dropped After the Rain, and while things are still solidly analog, its production is more expansive, glossier.
Which brings us to Gratitude. While not to be mistaken for anything resembling folk or indie-folk, one genre the album does evoke, lamentably, is new age. Most serious musicians would be insulted by this estimation, and its a shame to have to say it about a singer-songwriter with as much talent as Leftwich, but the edgeless Gratitude couldn’t fight its way out of a plant nursery. It sounds like a tepid, generic, relaxation track meant to be played softly in the background of a yoga studio.
Amidst layers of sheen and programmed beats, the album finds Leftwich’s Elliot Smith vocal tendencies finally getting away from him, like an untended rash. What worked for the late Portland legend doesn’t for Leftwich. Why? Because Smith’s mellow delivery is given an acid flavor by the hit of the dark vinegar that are his lyrics and are salted by more abundant and less predictable harmonic structures. Despite impressive, expensive-sounding production values and Leftwich’s lustrous vibrato, Gratitude falls short of what it could be.
Gratitude
Matt Finklives and works in Brooklyn. Go to organgrind.com for more of his work.
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