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Lawrence and Leigh

Lawrence and Leigh Radio

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02 Heeled Shoes.mp3
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02 Heeled Shoes.mp3
Album:
Released: Mar 7, 2011
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General Info

  • Genre: Folk Rock / Indie

    Location BROOKLYN, New York, Un

    Profile Views: 10439

    Last Login: 6/24/2011

    Member Since 1/5/2010

    Website lawrenceandleigh.com

    Type of Label Unsigned

  • Bio

    Lawrence & Leigh is a collaboration of two artists living in Brooklyn. We've just finished recording our first major work, an album entitled Odyssey Vol. III: Hills and Masts, due to be released March 7, 2011. Stay tuned here to follow all of our projects including the Odyssey's first two volumes which we'll begin work on soon..

  • Members

    Andrew Lawrence Kalleen, Kristin Leigh Stokes

  • Influences

    .. National Contact: .... Green Light Co... Janelle Rogers.. Phone: 248.336.9696.. Email: jrogers (at) greenlightgopublicity.com

  • Sounds Like

    If Andrew Kalleen wasn’t a classically trained musician, one wonders if a single note on Lawrence & Leigh’s debut EP “Hills and Masts” would fall within the western canon-- such is his fascination with the body and shape of noise. Yet, this fascination with sound is filtered through the passion Kalleen and Stokes feel for the ripe relation of harmony and the melodic nuances of rock, pop, jazz, soul-- a passion that pushes the siren call of the atonal avant-garde from center stage until becomes more of structuring influence, a motif, a fascination that rather than stealing the show feeds and nurtures the songwriting-- which is at the core of what this album really is-- songs, written and recorded. Really, really well. If there is a quintessential trade-off between the extremes of emotive timber that we hear in drone and noise rock, and the comfort of more comprehensible soundscapes, Lawrence & Leigh show us that you can have your cake and eat it too-- and yet, we’re never quite made comfortable. Billy Holliday meets Fleet Foxes meets Sigur Ross meets-- well, say they all meet up under the Williamsburg JMZ subway line. When Kalleen’s mode waxes a little ragged, Stokes vocals often help soften things a bit. Just a spoon full of harmony helps the melody go down? Thank god for buckets. Kalleen says, “all of the melodies are written without text. Then I use the rhythm of the line to find where accents in the text should be, and only use text that flows in that rhythm.” How does the melancholy of “Healed Shoes” articulate the depression that the verses later develop? How does the major lift precipitate the courage that the song’s protagonist gathers to walk away from a dead intimacy? It’s as if the music is a a soundtrack to feeling thinking being words that move through time on their own. This is not three-chord rock. Like a Jungian archetype, the music on its own recalls some elemental, interminable story, insists that it is rooted in some ancient ,incomprehensible structure, and demands that the spoken story actualize itself, that the lyrics stands up and say something that helps us understand what it means to be human being. And they do. For Stokes and Kalleen, two west-coast transplants, “Hills and Masts” cement the notion that Brooklyn is their creative home. There’s a moment of Musique concrète sound composition filled with Brooklyn street noise that drifts towards a Tom Yorke ballad before tumbling towards a spiraling harmony of epic, God-Speed-You-Black-Emporer porportions. And again-- just before the brink, we’re pulled back to earth by a musicianship that one might even label a practical sensibility-- if a six-song EP that spans two coasts, half a century of American musicianship, and took over a year to record can at all be called practical

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