Continuing their quest to splice ’60s R&B vibes with a ’70s garage rock delivery, “Morning Noon & Night” is the latest sonic blast from the west country’s premier anarcho-soul brotherhood, Leathers. As always, they blend spaciousness with punch, using just three sonic strands – drums, guitar, and vocals – to first create an understated delivery of short, sharp, and shockingly effective spikiness before building up the sound, doubling up the beats, and cranking up the guitars. Grunge-soul? It’s as good a tag line as any.
“Morning Noon & Night,” like much of this duo’s output, is a lesson in how you can fill a sonic landscape with just a few carefully positioned beats and a modest helping of deftly placed strokes of the guitar. Groove is not found in washes of double-tracking and ornate drum fills; it is found in the basic structures that are at the heart of a song. As Leathers go little further than drawing these cool yet basic sonic lines and leaving the song unadorned enough that you can see that process in action, how can their music be anything other than, well, groovy?
As they slash and pound their way through a ritual to resurrect a sound that never made it that far out of the Detroit basements and Chicago rehearsal spaces of yesteryear, perhaps this time the disenchanted punks and dissatisfied soul scensters, the rock and roll aficianados and alt-dance denizens will unite behind Leathers and their brand of forward-thinking nostalgia. Together they can storm the barricades of conformity and comfort zones, pop pap and rock dross, and usher in a new age of raw groove. Wouldn’t that be something?
