The cultishly beloved polymath returns to writing songs with the obscure and cerebral ‘Real Home.’ 

Moving between noisy DIY, sincere liedand retro, mathy pop, ‘Real Home’is a collection that is self-consciously more communicative and immediate than recent projects. Take for instance 2021’s ‘Trespass on Foot,’described as a “long record in two parts,” two hours of sprawling and difficult compositions across three “unorthodox” guitars, cittern, double bass, and voices. ‘Real Home’is similarly orchestral in sensibility – through composed and brimming with instruments – but engages in a much more straightforward way. 

Leonard is known for his array of highly allusive material – the five tracksof ‘Deveraun Sevaun’ are responses to five works of literature and ‘Trespass on Foot’is dedicated to an esoteric Lithuanian filmmaker. This record is self-avowedly, if not conspicuously, a departure from that tradition – a genius’ attempt to produce something that you don’t have to know about to understand. Or at least, this is what I take Leonard to mean when, in the album’s accompanying text, he describes his intention to produce songs “as objects … songs like stones and not bogs.” Not an intuitive analogy, but I like it: a stone-like song is smooth, digestible, fits in the palm of the hand.

The record’s structure is sprawling and unpredictable but with recurring themes of the city, home, and partnership. Opener ‘Pass Between Houses’ winds themes of urban anomie and disconnection into a restless, atonal tumble with a strong sense of forward movement and direction, as if the music’s about to escape its reins. Leonard’s trick here is to combine those harsh elements with an urgently communicative and unpredictable vocal line. ‘Real Home’ and ‘Treat Me A Stranger’ sketch out warmer, loosely defined images of household and companionship: “the smell of inside,” making the bed. Here we encounter some cleaner and more straightforward arrangements – songs as stones, I guess.

For me, ‘Real Home’ has all the intensity and immediacy of a gospel standard, with Leonard’s impulsive, deeply felt delivery and free timing recalling Jeff Buckley or Nina Simone. As for ‘Treat Me A Stranger’, it is so telling that Leonard can knock out an evocative, “did I hear this in the womb” kind of number, almost a gimmick at forty seconds, because he thought ‘Real Home’ didn’t flow well enough into ‘Utopia of Bog’. These two are described as “in a sense … the same song,” and they may be as close to a love song as you can find in his discography. 

Leonard’s leftfield outlook on domestic life and love takes us from noir murder mystery to peat bogs to soviet poetry. ‘Theatre for Change’ assembles truncated urban detective fiction out of folky twang and noisy DIY textures. Meanwhile ‘Utopia of Bog,’ which begins as an enchanting, marshy dirge and signs off with a noisy outro, has a sense of hopefulness which suits its theme: natural carbon capture. Pushing carbon deep out of sight becomes analogous for the human response to crisis: “I am very pro-bog,” Leonard reassures us in his commentary, “but I found this compelling symbolically.” Despite the elusive, aloof presentation of the track, Leonard trails a handful of genius hooks, rallying choral harmonies and satisfying moments of homophony. The bog is only the most memorable of a series of symbolic images, delivered by a range of narrators, from which the record is assembled. Leonard’s own voice has astonishing range in register, inflection, and delivery, and is joined by a broader cast: at the end of ‘the Kiss,’ a gothic chorus asserts cryptically, “You can’t come in, no north, no course,’ before collapsing into a kind of frenzied canon. In this 10-minute, through-composed epic, multivocal commotion whirls around the unifying centripetal: “The record isn’t real … but so what? Just to say I like that.”   

I take this line to be a statement about the shortcomings of songwriting as a form of self-realisation, and a new faith in just making something good. This vast, highly wrought record says and does so much, and draws from so many places (This Heat, Hank Williams and Slipknot are all mentioned), that it is difficult to summarise beyond that. There is magic in its ability to at once communicate in a direct and infectious way, and hint at hidden, enigmatic meanings and influences. ‘Real Home’s’ immense range, suppleness, and winning sincerity make it uniquely compulsive. I particularly enjoyed the artist’s commentary, which is in Times New Roman and has an appendix.