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Owen
New Leaves
Hobbledehoy/ Polyvinyl
Mike Kinsella (aka Owen) has one hell of a knack with a clever lyric, and that comes to the fore more than ever before on ‘New Leaves’. True, the music is accomplished – pretty but solid, built around strummed acoustic guitars, wandering synth lines, piano and drums which waver between brushed and thumped – but the combination of the lush palette with strikingly literate, cynical, amusing and often jaw-dropping lyrics makes ‘New Leaves’ an absolute revelation.
A pretty guitar figure opens the surprisingly titled Ugly On The Inside as Kinsella opines “the lighting in this room doesn’t do a thing/ for you and your complexion/ I’m sorry but it’s the truth/ you look like the goddamn living dead.” Holy hell.
Elsewhere, on Never Been Born, what starts as a celebration of love making one feel young downshifts to reality in the final verse, finishing on this delightful note: “these old bones don’t feel so old when I’m home with you/ when I’m not with you I’m shitting blood and puking piss/ sweating bile and awkwardness/ it’s a young man’s game and about time I quit”.
Yet somehow, despite (or possibly because of) the imagery, Kinsella’s songs seem totally genuine. Rather than employing quirkiness for its own sake, the songs on ‘New Leaves’ benefit from their inherent bizarreness in the lyrical department, giving tired themes new life from their juxtaposition. Kinsella’s love of literature is alive and well here too, but rather than being pretentious, it instead seems disarmingly charming when he sings “literary romantics/ they’ll fuck like Wilde and they’ll die like Hemingway” on Good Friends, Bad Habits.
“Disarmingly charming” is quite possibly the best phrase to describe Kinsella and this rather remarkable collection of wonderful songs, but if I were pushed for a few more, I’d probably say “delightful”, “literary” and, above all, “utterly essential”.
Patrick Lang.
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