Leo Harmonay

Singer/songwriter Leo Harmonay is back this summer with some of his most erudite compositions released to date in Naked Rivers, a ten-track LP that explores dreams both past and present through the lens of an elegiac folk melody and a myriad of lyrical diamonds. Naked Rivers doesn’t ask a lot from us in exchange for a smorgasbord of musical might, and though it’s got some deeply evocative ballads in the grinding “Patterns” and brutally emotive “The Ballad of the Unknown Driver,” I wouldn’t call this Harmonay’s tribute to the classical acoustic dirge. This is Leo Harmonay at his most exposed, and more explicitly, his most vulnerable. 

 URL: http://www.lharmonic.com/ 

The string play of “Labor Day,” “Best Mistake” and the howling “You and the Sun” is breathtaking, and I think that it’s definitely an instrumental cornerstone of this entire album. Guitars remain the centerpiece even in vocal showcases like “Lost Summer,” the title track and “Patterns,” and even when the verses slip into enigmatic territory, the strings make it impossible for us to ignore the narrative behind their riddles. The instrumental portion of Naked Rivers is what makes it such an immersive LP from start to finish, and that unfortunately hasn’t been the case in all of the alternative folk records I’ve heard recently. Lyrically speaking, I think that “Broken Cup,” “Contours” and “Best Mistake” are some of the most profoundly sensitive songs that Leo Harmonay has penned since first entering the public eye. 

He’s careful to avoid self-indulgent themes, but in these three compositions, it’s clear that he’s not holding anything back from us. It’s not that his past work has been poetically elusive – quite the contrary – but more that this content is so dramatically different that it’s a noticeable change in artistic trajectory of Harmonay, whose genre was conceived by studious creatures of habit. Though there are a lot of songs on this record sporting a slower tempo, there’s a ton of aggressively melodic hooks spread out across the tracklist to make everything feel fairly balanced or, at the very least, aesthetically complementary. The few compositional conflicts (mainly in “Lucky Guess,” the intro to “The Ballad of the Unknown River Driver” and the Enlia duet “Lost Summer”) that are present exemplify the very reason why critics like myself have come to adore Harmonay’s against the grain vocal style, and more recently, his willingness to take this sound in a different direction than he was previously. 

 SOUNDCLOUD: https://soundcloud.com/lharmonic 

Naked Rivers is, as I see it, an artistic epiphany for Leo Harmonay, and I classify it as his most essential set of recordings to ever share the same tracklist. This is a fever pitch moment for his career; everything that he was working towards in the moderate Lharmonic and experimental The Blink of an Eye is realized here in high definition audio, and while I can’t be certain whether or not this is representative of his creative peak, there’s no denying that this album is the most important, and potentially influential, release that he’s put together for the fans so far in his career. 

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Trace Whittaker

Newcastle-upon-Tyne

9/2019