Swiss band Leopardo are ready to unveil their fifth album, Side A / Side B, today on Dot Dash Sounds in North America and on Chrüsimüsi Records in Europe. The powerful melodies unite a lot of bizarre and disparate elements from saxophone to harmonium to recordings of goats. Yet, in the midst of all the weirdness, somehow it all ties together into a brilliantly coherent record.
“With the album Side A / Side B Romain Savary (Leopardo) goes to the depths of his roots,” explains synth player and vocalist Radiana Basso, “embracing the countryside to the core and extending this connection to his homeland in time and space, in a way that brings us to grasp its various nuances: the cowboys, the goats, the loneliness, the landscape, the wonderful sense of disconnection from society and commonplaces in the various senses of the term. The countryside Romain tells us about is also a boundless, emotional moorland in which the vastness of possible emotions is almost frightening, and “opening to the horizon is always a responsibility to be assumed as good adults.” Romain, in the lyrics as much as in sonority, allows the various characters who inhabit himself to meet and coexist in one big party: The selfish spoiled child is also a repentant ex-banker, a bucolic wandering poet, a sparrowhawk who sings like a nightingale, and a proud unemployed man seeking approval.
“The life journey that Romain recounts, in a profound but ironic way, on this album is evident,” Basso continues. “The attempt to emancipate oneself from certain social pre-constructs (monogamy, steady work, synthetic entertainment, the cliché of the independent and courageous man) goes hand in hand with an attempt at sonic emancipation in which Leopardo allows himself, even with a certain boast, to bring different worlds together by giving birth to a sound that we could define as ‘garage-country-psychedelic.’
“With this album Leopardo encourages us to embrace our lights and shadows with the same compassion (side A/ side B ;). The only way to love the unknown is to embrace our limitations, to understand and exorcise them in an effort to experience challenges and failures as a game, with the same spirit of transformation that art allows. To sum it all up in one sentence, quoting Romain himself: ‘This album granted us the freedom to include goats in the musical project. (And we really love goats).’”
Check out the album below.
You can order the record from Chrüsimüsi Records’ Bandcamp in Europe and from Leopardo’s Bandcamp in North America. Follow Leopardo on Facebook and Instagram for future updates.
Photo Credit: K. Nauber
