LEYA
Flood Dream
2020, NNA Tapes
With a cover like that, we expected sleazy post punk or something else too cool for school. Anything but this, really. A duo of voices, a violin, and a strategically detuned harp. Songs that ache and drip with a sad and uncompromising romantic seriousness that we sometimes try to dismiss in ourselves as juvenile, but which never quite goes away.
We can feel there are parallels for what LEYA are doing in modern classical music and the obscure outskirts of adventurous ‘pop’ genres alike, but listening to Flood Dream we really don’t care. There’s a singular energy here that draws us in time and time again, and the rest of the world and its history melts away for a while.
There’s a sadness here quite often, yes, but not a debilitating, isolating one. We feel called to a space where our sadness is shared, or echoed, or at least is just allowed to be. Given room to breathe, breathe along to these voices, it heals a bit at a time.
Not just that. There’s a danger and a mystery. Visualised in the above film for “INTP”, we feel seduction, the intimate ties between love, desire, and death. From the relative safety of auditory language, perhaps, but it doesn’t feel safe. Parts of us are afraid something will lodge itself inside us and eat away at us until we too rush off into ecstatic oblivion. Or to be fair, the seed was always there, ready to be awakened.
We’re blessed to feel. Flood Dreams eventually lets us go, and then we’re reminded of people and things we love, have loved, might love. Life and creation are endlessly complex, but the mind sometimes finds focal points to settle in so that things fall into place, if even just a little bit. We’ll be coming back often to whichever abandoned house in the mists of time this music originates in. Maybe it moves around constantly. We’ll find it. We’ll follow our ears and our heart.
‘Flood Dreams’ is out on 6 March 2020 on CD/LP/Digital throuh NNA Tapes.
Reviewed by Genevieve
