Kiran Leonard is just 20 years old, but if you were looking to paint him as a wide-eyed ingénue, you've already missed the boat: Such is his experience and tireless work ethic he's already coming to resemble a veteran. A rangy young man from Oldham, Greater Manchester, Leonard picked up the mandolin aged five, and wrote his breakout 2013 song "Dear Lincoln" – a manic piece of psychedelic pop, like Van Dyke Parks reincarnated in the body of a hyperactive English schoolboy – when he was 14 years old. Currently ensconced at Oxford University's Wadham College, where he's studying Spanish and Portuguese, Leonard is an intellectual sponge drinking up an ocean of knowledge. His frame of reference encompasses playwright Samuel Beckett and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the mangled productions of Death Grips and the brainbox pop of Elephant 6, while "Pink Fruit" – the second song on this, his second LP – is a sprawling song suite with more twists and turns in its 16 minutes than Slint's Spiderland. The crux of its peculiar lyric? An erotic encounter between a woman and a squid.
It's a lot, right? Right. Grapefruit is by turns astounding, accomplished and difficult to digest, an album shouldering ambitions so big that you fear that at any point it might give way at the knees. Undoubtedly, Leonard is an autodidact of amazing talent and energy. At times his idiosyncratic performance style resembles Dirty Projectors' Dave Longstreth – see "Don't Make Friends With Good People," with those wandering, pointillist guitar lines, that voice that leaps boldly across octaves, as if participating in some tipsy parkour. Elsewhere, he recalls a fellow British outsider, Richard Dawson, whose take on the narrative folk tradition is both wild-eyed and whimsical. The lolloping, rusty groove of "Öndör Gongor" is a fractured song-story sketched in enigmatic strokes – a strapping maritime fantasy set "in the night of the shotgun," in which sharks lurk as "a clatter of shins hit the dock" and a mysterious orb named Ethel waits, hungrily. The song ends with staccato blasts of guitar and a chanted shanty-like coda, although how all this relates to the subject of the song's title – a giant who lived in early-20th century Mongolia – is left unaddressed.
Grapefruit is a gnarlier-sounding record than its predecessor, its lurching guitars and skittering, free percussion recalling math-rock luminaries such as Don Caballero or Storm & Stress. It is at its most digestible, however, when Leonard plays it orchestral. "Caiaphas in Fetters" is a beautiful confection of strings and fluttering guitar that finds him posing questions to a lover: "Ask yourself/Do you feel as I feel?" "Half Ruined Already," meanwhile, is a fingerpicked love song in which two participants – one legless, one armless – come together in one romantic whole. It was inspired by a Werner Herzog short about a couple who met in a leper's colony, but succeeds in taking such grim subject matter and alchemizing it into warm sentiment. At the other end of the scale is the somewhat opaque "Exeter Services," which flips between quizzical improv and skidding emo, all flail and gasp and rickety cathedrals of language built to collapse: "I'm in the Catskills! Total duality! All of Ophelia! Absolute anarchy!"
Grapefruit is 57 minutes long and feels packed to the rafters, as if Leonard is a hoarder of ideas and song fragments, unwilling or unable to let anything go. Take "Pink Fruit." In its 16 minutes, it flits between noisy spazz-rock, folk shambling, woodwind interludes, short-wave radio tinkering and free percussion. I'd stop short of calling it confused – even when it's getting wild, there's enough recurring lyrical cues to suggest its maker is working to a detailed map. But he can be rather an impatient guide, and while the ground it covers is startling and often picturesque, Grapefruit is an album you feel led through, rather than being left to explore or inhabit. Perhaps in this regard, at least, Kiran Leonard still has things to learn.
