Five albums in six years is a fine work rate for any modern artist, but quality is always preferable to quantity, so Leah Callahan’s real accomplishment is the high standards to which these albums conform. Here is an artist who can clearly tick both boxes.
And a third box, one that she always manages to tick, is the one marked sonic adventure, something which manifests itself as what a better man than I described as her ability to let the song dictate the sound that it draws around it, rather than writing songs within a signature sound. He also pointed out that her music feels like a tribute to her own record collection, something most artists do, but rarely as well as Callahan does here, where she Magpie-like collects all those sonic shiny things from her favorite music and uses them to build her own creative nest.
So, Our Lady of the Sad Adventure, follows the path set by her previous albums, one where genres are abandoned in favor of what best serves the song, making for an album of shifting sounds and styles. Opener, “Fall In Love With Your Mind,” sets out the sonic stall perfectly – a dense, psychedelic-tinged sound, more Paisley Underground than Haight Ashbury, with a Johnny Marr-esque riff drifting through its heart – a song jumping eras, genres, and geographies.
The title track is the perfect foil to such heavier melodics, being funky and deft and buoyant and spacious, sitting somewhere between Talking Heads’ groove and Talk Talk’s light but layered soundscapes. “Driving” is full of taut twangs and splintered, shimmering guitars and melodic basslines; it is dark and brooding, brave and brilliant, and “Miss Your” runs on heavy, nostalgic rock ‘n’ roll riffs and swathes of chamber-pop sonics to form a brilliant baroque ‘n’ roll sojourn.
With names as revered as the sonic adventurers Turkish Delight, press favorites Betwixt, and shoegazers The Glass Set, to her name, Leah Callahan has already done so much to break down the idea of genre and conformity, a mission that, with collaborator Chris Stern, she has since taken to new heights. I’m not saying that was ever the primary mission, more a happy consequence of making ground breaking music, but it does show that here is someone who understands that once you get beyond the idea of genre and style, you have the freedom to mix and match and merge and meld and make music that lies out of the grasp of listener expectation, has the sonic world to work with, and which is brilliantly unbounded.
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