Aha, I fear we are, once again, encountering the distillation of the post punk ethic. Not the kind of home brew psychosis that gave us The Fall but the modern day equivalent of dare to be didactic bravado that can only ever be the product of a rebellion against the digital age.
Lucy Leave – from Oxford it would seem – have learned the lessons of the present well with these six songs striving to be different without resorting to wholesale larceny of the past yet there is something unsettling here as if their theatrical intent is more derived from posturing than purpose with the curious feeling that every song is longer and wider than it is. Some may, of course, say that is proof of the sheer quantity of hidden meaning to be found within the discordant notes that reverberate through all that is here and perhaps that is so, for “Nightroad” and “Grief” resonate not with the ghost of what was but with the ghost of what was not.
So, while not quite trapped in the arthouse, Lucy Leave are undoubtedly far from the mainstream and are thus difficult to pigeonhole in the music landscape of today. That means their commercial failure is just short of a certainty but they are, nonetheless, never boring.