Dominique Leone - Dominique Leone (CD)

All Music Guide

Considering the litany of literate talkingpoint touchstones that filter their way through the twisted pop phantasmagoria of Dominique Leone's selftitled debut, the inaugural release on HansPeter Lindstrøm's Strømland imprint for starters, the bigleague melodicism (and restlessly conceptual thrust) of Brian Wilson, Todd Rundgren, and XTC; the whimsical arcanity of the Canterbury scene; the brutalist cacophonics of Boredoms; and over a decade's worth of postIDM exploration and electrodance rejiggering, from Cornelius to Matmos to Ellen Allien, not to mention the conspicuously cerebral residue of a pedigreed classical background it's perhaps a nobrainer that it ends up sounding like very little except for itself. What's more surprising is that it's also remarkably cohesive despite a seemingly limitless outpouring of ideas and a penchant for sudden stylistic left turns (including jarring noise barrages) comparable to the convoluted neoprog of the Fiery Furnaces (and, at times, Of Montre...al) and an occasionally manic, giddy energy that recalls the dayglo pastiche work of Dan Deacon and the Go Team, the album generally avoids merely refracting its cripplingly broad influence roster into a formless, indulgently esoteric hodgepodge. It's held together in part by a consistently dense, garishly glossy sonic aesthetic that layers buzzy, metallic keyboards and guitars around Leone's grittily processed voice, which is often multitracked into high, queasy, saccharine harmonies in a malformed take on his beloved Beach Boys, with frequent electronic disruptions of varying obnoxiousness. That may not sound very appealing, and, admittedly, it's not a style that makes for particularly easy listening, but it's an effective, intriguing, and distinctive one nevertheless. By juxtaposing such a willfully "difficult" approach with the surprisingly traditionalist popcraft that lies at the heart of most of these songs (and they are songs, albeit often encumbered as much by bizarre structures and knotty harmonies as they are by textural zaniness), Leone isn't just screwing around with thwarted accessibility for its own perverse, limited ends, but seems rather to be genuinely striving for new ways to integrate pop melodics, unorthodox compositional structure, and avantgarde sonics into a workable whole. Read more Less