Leverton Fox have somehow largely cut themselves loose from contemporary cliches. Coming in a gorgeous Crayola-spattered cover, Country Dances is made of equal parts jazzy articulation and jagged electronic invention.
Not that there’s anything obviously ‘jazz’ here, just heavily treated percussion and brass being moulded and distressed along with location recordings and plenty of abstract electronic tics and tears. Maybe the spirit of Han Bennink is at work, but in what feels like a thoroughly electronic sensibility.
Another parallel might be with Supersilent, though Leverton Fox play punk spit to Supersilent’s New Wave polish. Certainly they come across a lot more gritty and demented than Polar Bear and there are even shades of 23 Skidoo and, more substantially, Nurse With Wound and very early Cabaret Voltaire.
Country Dances gets rough in places, in the sense that things are allowed to follow a logic that sometimes leads right away from secure musical tracks, providing quite a few genuinely startling moments. It’s also funny in paces, like a fuzz-toned Hanna-Barbera tune. Some of this material hovers at the edge of electro-acoustic purism, while some even has the feeling of Dada collage. I hope to hear a lot more of Leverton Fox, and I’m glad to hear they are touring soon.
-Andy Wilson-
