Review Summary: True and unfulfilled
Throughout the last decade and well into the new one, Leyland Kirby has remained a profoundly creative and thought provoking crafter of ambient music. His music has carefully documented humanity’s helpless infatuation with the past; through the lush and skyward melancholic epics released under his own name, to the disintegrating and surreal past he actualizes through diminished loops and eschews as The Caretaker. However Kirby’s latest EP, released on legendary electronic label Apollo records, marks bold new ground for his intensely ambitious and prolific sound. It’s a perplexing direction, even amongst his own irregular standards, that the music here nods more to electronic producers like the atmospheric amalgamations of ASC, the acidic synthesis of Ceephax, and the overt melodica of Mrs. Jynx than the rich, organic, and singular qualities of his past work.
Greeting us to this erratic new landscape is ‘Breaks My Heart Each Time’, an ever expanding culmination of computerized textures that flourish and multiply like amoeba through a liquid membrane, as they widen and amplify to create a much larger being in the form of gorgeous acidic swells that mark the halfway point of the track. At this point the life form continues to expand and pulsate, attaching lightly repeating MIDI textures that recall the cryogenics and plasticity of Oneohtrix Point Never. Consequently following this pattern of electronic elasticity is ‘Last Ditch Legacy’, which introduces a series of snappy, garage leaning percussive cycles that transform it into a certified introspective banger, before overtly synthetic synth stabs teeter Kirby’s most blatantly out of character track here in and out of over exaggeration.
Subsequently ‘Diminishing Emotion’ reacts to this in a calm, reflective, and tedious way through endlessly cycling ripples and waves that recall Brain Eno’s ambient series or a more minimal interpretation of the opening credits of The Shining (a film that heavily influenced his Caretaker project). This sound eventually becomes exhausting after it fails to develop into anything substantial in its lengthy 9 minute running time. Closing out the EP, ‘Staring Down The Sun’ abruptly shifts the contemplative mood to that of being chased down a rainy tech noir street by blurry mechanical thugs, thanks to an energetic and looming arcade style arrangement. Unfortunately the action quickly loses stride as the track meanders its way through a series of improvised synth noodling, unwinding the sense of constraint and vitality of its incidental pictures.
Considering how out of character
Breaks My Heart Each Time is stylistically for Leyland Kirby, many long-time fans have raised questions of why exactly he choose to release it under his own name, and not something more suiting like his electronic and techno-flirting alias The Stranger. It could possibly be that the shadowy and decayed realms The Stranger takes electronic music to wouldn’t suit such an animated and melodic sound, or that this EP is simply a careless and unrestrained electronic exercise for Kirby, or it could conclusively be that he envisions taking a completely new direction with his sound. These are, at the moment, questions without answers. However
Breaks My Heart Each Time acts stylistically for Leyland Kirby, conceptually it still manages to root itself within his ever-expanding sonic thesis of heartache and fragmentation in reaction to the past at the foreboding hands of time, and, despite its shortcomings, that is something worth applauding.
