I first encountered Dominique Leone not through his reviews on this website (where he still contributes), but at a music writer's conference in 2007, where he delivered a presentation called "What You Hear Is Never What They Heard, and What You Get Is Never What They Had." He spoke casually of physics but confessed he didn't understand everything he was talking about. (Comforting, because I didn't either.) He'd lose sight of his points and then pounce when they reappeared. His arguments weren't presented; they were splattered. One explanation for the scrambled approach is nerves, another is that it's just the way he thinks: playfully and with frequent time changes.
So I wasn't surprised when I first heard his music on 2008's Dominique Leone: prog and big-budget 1970s pop like Genesis or Electric Light Orchestra shoved into a bedroom studio and butchered. It was an exhilarating, restless record; it was also too much of a lot. This tension remains unresolved on Abstract Expression. There's no space left unstuffed and no groove left undisturbed. Leone's technical feats are stunning but his musical ones are scattershot. Songs like "I'm the Police" and "Reasonable Snow" balance his little fetishes-- for bright-eyed and schizoid humor, for unexpectedly dissonant chord changes that resolve without calling too much attention to themselves-- with legible melodies and choruses. Other times, the music is annoyingly complex and the performances are buffed so hard, all that's left is bone. At five minutes, a song as restless as "Cover Yourself" could use an intermission.
Abrupt time changes aren't necessarily a display of musical creativity in the same way that crying in public isn't necessarily a display of emotional honesty. They're extremes, which have as much to do with process as with product. And process usually affects the artist more than the audience-- the band that slaves in the studio every day for a year doesn't necessarily make a better album than the band that finishes one in an afternoon. Dominique Leone's music is complex, but sometimes it's complex in lieu of anything else, like he made an obstacle just to see if he could get around it-- and it's in those moments that Abstract Expression feels more like a private ritual or a personal reward than something designed for an audience.
If it sounds like I'm coming down hard it's because I'm biased: I like that Leone is making things difficult for himself; I like that he's trying to draw a line from electro-pop to Todd Rundgren; I like the noise and the warped melodies and the feeling that I am lost in a brightly lit nightmare. Leone has worked with artists as disparate as R. Stevie Moore and Lindstrøm, and his writing has revealed a taste for musical idiosyncrasies from 70s-pop auteurs like Harry Nilsson to shadow-dwellers with hilarious names like Evil Moisture (whose then-new release was described by Leone, in his "Out Music" column on this site, as "unsurprisingly fucking chaotic"). Point is, Dominique Leone is doing something unique and probably knows it. If anything, the only thing holding him back is that he doesn't relax and forget it more often.
