Austin Sound

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.

Leatherbag, our frontrunner for the worst named band that you should actually be listening to (apparently it’s a Finnegan’s Wake allusion, so we guess they get a pass just for being smarter than us), will have a new album coming out sometime in the next few months. Titled Hey Day, it’s their first full length effort since 2008’s Love and Harm, and since then, frontman Randy Reynolds has put together a pretty crack band behind him. If you haven’t caught the quartet lately, they’re definitely worth checking in on, like perhaps next month when they play Lambert’s. In the meantime, you can catch up with this track, “Lines”, which leads off the new album and which Leatherbag has shared with us to download below. And no, it’s not about those kind of lines, but we still think you’ll like it. They also have a Big Star cover up on their myspace page that is worth checking out (what’s up with everyone covering Big Star these days?). Download “Lines” below: