Leonard Mynx – Le Petit Mort
self-released 2010
[tags: folk, alt country, experimental, FREE, 2010]
Listen while reading:
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Everything seems to point straight to Portland/Oregon – always. So much musical talent and so much good music comes from there, that I don’t want to believe, that it’s sheer coincidence. But this is no secret and Portland is well known for his flowering music scene. Another artist hailing from Portland you’re may be not aware of, is Leonard Mynx who just self-released his second album Le Petit Mort. This particular album will be given away for free in late spring and it seems that it is the perfect music for a Sunday afternoon. On the one side there is some chilled acoustic folk representing weekend’s spare time, on the other hand Sunday is and always was the cursed Saturday because it leads straight to Monday. And for that, Sunday can be a real pain in the arm. This darker side of Sunday afternoons is really good reflected by the darker side of the record. But I will come to this shortly.
If you listen to Le Petit Mort you mustn’t expect the usual alt country and folk influenced album for it clearly reaches over this description. Tracks like the beautiful album opener Sing Radio seem to tell you otherwise for it is pure alt country, maybe in the vein of the new Joe Pug release Messenger (about which you will read here soon too). The drums suite the guitars very well and Leonard’s voice got some serious life experience in it – and at the least when the harmonica kicks in, you have fallen in love with the track. But as soon as you reach track 4, The Bones, you will see that your early feeling wasn’t right.
Further up I spoke of the darker side of the record and this track is the reason why I did so. Passed is the cozy alt country sound, what follows is avant-garde singer-songwriter stuff with circus influences and filtered vocals. The surprising thing is that you don’t have the feeling that this disturbs the overall experience of the album – that is if you heard the whole thing at least twice. The reason for it isn’t so hard to find: if you try to describe how the album sounds, you can’t say that it is alt country with one experimental exception, because you’ll find this “exception” again in the tracks Maybe and Float. This means, that they are constitutional for the overall character and no exceptions (because 3 of 8 tracks are experimental). And if you have this in mind, you’ll come to the conclusion that those tracks don’t disturb but initially create. Two amendments: as I said that The Bones has circus influences I only meant this track and not Maybe or Float, these two work with other experimental features such as reverb or distortion.
The second amendment is sort of a redundant side note: There was a time I listened to metal (no way! – yet it’s true) and one album really stayed in my mind even though I never had a physical copy of it, sigh: King Diamond’s concept album The Puppetmaster. I don’t know why, but as I listened to The Bones something triggered this memory – and that’s really strange because both artists share like zero characteristics…maybe it’s something to the atmosphere or the mood of the track – who knows.
At the end I’m a bit baffled how I could tag this music – avant-garde alt country, alt country influenced experimental singer-songwriter stuff, experimental folk country…hmm. Mynxed alt country seems to be the best I can think of. Maybe this is also the right term to describe Sunday’s disambiguation between spare time and weekend vanitas: mynxed. To grab Le Petit Mort and to get your personal little trip through the music world of Leonard Mynx (MySpace) you have to wait until late spring when he will release a free digital version as well as a physical CD version with even more tracks on it. Firstly you maybe will be a bit scared, but only a scary ghost train is a good ghost train, isn’t that so?
