It's perfectly apt that advance copies of the new Skygreen Leopards EP come with a press kit that's almost unreadable. Even as the most ordered and poppy band in the Jewelled Antler constellation, which curates all things fractured and sublime (from droning field recordings to improvised psych-folk), Skygreen Leopards' music is similarly effaced, favoring a quaint and trippy aura over slick veneer. Naturalistic process is paramount; albums come with pithy back-stories haloed in hazy traceries of light, flickering with pastoral forest music, and whispering tape-hiss sprites.
The story here involves a visit to an acquaintance of Arlo Guthrie, a shed containing an "ancient drumset" and a "cobwebby electric guitar," an all-night jam session, and daughters dancing in the moonlight. Skygreen Leopards recognizes the power inherent in old things, not just in the sounds they can make, but in the way their dormant charge of history (all that music, built up inside them) can detonate in the mind of the reverent user, blowing open the doors that lead away from self-consciousness and toward spontaneous states where music occurs as naturally as rain. And maybe they also found an ancient Xerox machine in that shed, all splintery wood and rusted iron gears, and used it to run off the ghostly, barely-there text in their one sheet. Readability would definitely take a back seat to the authenticity of the antique with Skygreen Leopards.
Since Skygreen Leopards' experiments hinge more on the magic moment-- a "first thought, best thought" impulse the Beats would've admired-- than the deliberate path, and because their naturalistic-bordering-on-mystical aesthetic is firmly established, Jehovah Surrender falls within their usual parameters: Six brightly misty psych-pop relics that barely hang together, reveling in organic now-ness instead of professional precision, charting another little section of the sun-baked pasture of Donovan Quinn's and Glenn Donaldson's collective mind.
The percussion has three modes, all of them similar: shambolic, faltering, and clumsy, although the dropped beats are part and parcel of their authenticity-of-imperfection vibe. On "Jehovah I Surrender", jerky rhythm guitars stab at approximate drum fills; a soaring vocal bleeds pastel light; a fuzzy psych-rock lead trudges woozily across the scene with weary grandeur. Standout track "Apparition of Suns (aka The Ferryman's Long Arms)" is full of bleary harmonies, with a terrifically druggy, weightless vibe. On "I Was a Thief", a throttled fuzz-bass line climbs and hovers in mid-air, and on "Let the Lion be Swallowed by a Dove", bleating foghorn-like guitars break like dawn over a jaunty strum. If Black Mountain is a cryogenically-frozen Velvet Underground awaking crusty-eyed but unbowed in the new millennium, Skygreen Leopards is Syd Barrett after the same long nap. Urban legend has it that anyone named Donovan's birth certificate comes printed on a handsome paisley stock; this stuff is hardwired into them.
