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Leatherbag’s Randy Reynolds has never shied away from his influences, highlighting them and pushing them to the fore even as he transforms them into his own style. That certainly remains the case with Hey Day, Leatherbag’s third LP and follow up to last year’s two excellent EPs, Tomorrow and Everything I Once Knew. The album sets its tone and conscience with lead-off track “Start All Over Again,” opening with a hefty bassline that sounds lifted straight from the Feelies’ “It’s Only Life” and Reynolds chiming in with lines like “It’s time for you to come full circle, and start all over again.” As Leatherbag continues to - by his own accord - resurface the aesthetic of Austin’s Eighties New Sincerity, he seems to do so as a brace against the mercurial fads of fleeting scenes, proposing with this Neo Sincerity is something that doesn’t purport to be timeless, but that it is above all genuine in its constant evolution as a work in progress. So when Reynolds calls on the opener “recognize that the past is still fiction,” it’s not a statement of trying to break from the past as much as not be bound and beholden to it, which would apply equally to Hey Day’s relationship to the present.
If all of this seems convoluted to place Leatherbag’s music in context, it still remains important. Hey Day is at times deceptively simple because of the quartet’s often straightforward approach and Reynold’s turn of his attention from folkier songs brimming with often stunning imagistic lines (as with his early work on Love Me Like the Devil or Nowhere Left to Run) to a more coherent sound and vision of a tight band with declaratory sentiments. Those sentiments can come off as sometimes scathingly critical of contemporary scenes, but only because Reynolds has matured into a much broader, long-term calculation of the music he is plying. This is clearest on songs like artist anthems “Forever Blue” and the gritty rocker “Senseless Irony,” the latter unloading nuggets like “Nobody knows just what to do, don’t gimme fiction, gimme truth!” before spitting out a chorus of “It’s all senseless, senseless i-ron-y.”
“Forever Blue,” one of the best tunes on the album, sets out the stakes a bit more clearly: “This is a song for the broken-hearted artists, who wrote some songs that never got charted, but always found a way to speak their mind.” The name-check of Alex Chilton might draw the most attention, but the more important element may be its preceding line: “This is not for the singer-songwriter, who thinks that he’s entitled, to always stand at the front of the line.” In a town where everyone one’s a musician (and likewise, a critic), this lash of Reynold’s disdain here is potent. And it’s not simply an anthem for the underdog, or humility, but rather an often forgotten realization that the “next big thing” is always already irrelevant.
What’s striking about this attitude on Hey Day is that it’s applied on an equally personal level as well. On the professional side, Reynold’s lines seem more like a self-reminder than outward facing castigation, and so they seep seamlessly down into the more intimate songs, as well. Take, for example, the transition on “Everything I Once Knew”: “I’ve been living in the same ol’ boring music scene, trying to get through the night to see what the daytime brings. Try to understand, honey if you can, some people hurt even before they fall,” followed by the album’s recurring emphasis on finding a solid foundation amid the relative flux of fad and emotion: “I’m tired of disbelieving, in everything that’s true, I’m trying to forget everything I once knew.” Add in the uber-sincerity of the following “Nothing Wrong With Love,” and the position for Reynolds seems to be that love sets that necessary foundation.
Those moments like “Nothing Wrong Love Balance” balance the album with a softer touch. “Honestly” delivers a late night, piano-led lullaby, “Streets on Fire” hearkens Springsteen in more than just title, and closer “This Time” leaves off with an affirmation of love and support that sets the often broiling commitment to art and dreams that highlight the rest of the album in a different light. And even the odd piano calamity that shuts down the last 20 seconds of the album feels like a release from constriction and expectation as a final statement. “Go To Sleep,” placed as the sixth song pivot of the ten track LP, bridges the two juxtaposing impulses throughout, beginning as a narcotic little number that drifts off in Reynolds’ understated, gruff drawl, before erupting into funky, Wilco-esque guitar sprawl that plays itself out.
The significance of Hey Day, and where Leatherbag seems to have settled at this point in the band’s career, rests ultimately in that relationship to the past, present, and an unknown future. It’s an exploration of that search for some kind of foundational “truth,” both personally and artistically. And perhaps that is what Reynolds finds so appealing in his Neo Sincerity, and the hearkening of a movement even as he eschews the vagaries of scenes. New Sincerity had its brief moment and limited impact, but did not purport to be anything it wasn’t or more important than it was – exactly what can be said of Hey Day.
Mp3 from Hey Day:
Lines
Websites:
www.leatherbagmusic.com
Myspace
