In the run-up to the release of his second album Grapefruit, Kiran Leonard has revealed the musical touchstones which map out his world. Boredoms, Kate Bush, the jazzy French Canterbury-rock types Etron Fou Leloublan, Fela Kuti, Swans, Scriabin and Sleaford Mods all colour his prog-tinged vision of music. And he looks elsewhere for ideas. The album's “Ondör Gongor” takes its title from a Mongolian giant while “Half-Ruined Already” is inspired by a Werner Herzog film.
Leonard has also declared that his liking for Bush is based on a surmise that her music is not spontaneous: she has, he says, a deliberate approach to her art which he shares. Craft is central for Leonard and Grapefruit's second track, the 16-minute “Pink Fruit”, more than underscores this. Obviously, the album makes demands of its listeners.
Born in Saddleworth on Greater Manchester's fringes, the 20-year-old Leonard currently studies Portuguese and Spanish at Oxford University’s Wadham College. The resumé adds up to an album bridging the gap between UK art-rockers like King Crimson and Slapp Happy, and the New York edginess of early-to-mid period Sonic Youth while overtly nodding to Radiohead and (more contemporarily) Field Music (or maybe Dutch Uncles, the Cheshire band over which they cast a shadow). Todd Rundgren is also in the mix.
Despite the disciplined approach to its sonic architecture and its inherent craft, Grapefruit sounds magpie-minded. All that Leonard loves does not cohere into a whole identifying him as singular. The album sounds as if a radio dial is being wildly spun through the soundtrack to his life. On “Pink Fruit”, passages indebted to “Paranoid Android” Radiohead – Leonard does a fine Thom Yorke – give way to others which could be drawn from a Field Music album. Opening cut “Secret Police” evokes A Wizard, A True Star Rundgren. Parts of “Ondör Gongor” marry Captain Beefheart and California jazz-punks The Minutemen to Sonic Youth as Leonard again tries Yorke on for size. Songs stop, start, twist, turn and fold back on themselves. Grapefruit refuses to stand still and reveals what inspires Leonard. But its myriad adopted voices do not actually say who he is.
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