Leo
Cicada Burnt
Peak Oil
Peak Oil is based in Los Angeles, but over the past few years, the label has established itself as a premier outpost for the most outré expressions of the UK hardcore continuum. Granted, describing those expressions can feel like a fool’s errand; as much as artists like Paperclip Minimiser, Low End Activist and Wrecked Lightship might reference dubstep, drum & bass or vintage rave music, they’re far more interested in subverting the past than recreating it, and their shared penchant for boundary-blurring alchemy is a big part of what makes their music such a compelling propsition.
Leo is the latest low-end eccentric to join that cohort, and his new Cicada Burnt LP is marked by an inherent physicality. The Manchester artist’s history as a drummer likely has something to do with that, the album is positively littered with rhythms. Fast rhythms, slow rhythms, delicate rhythms, crunchy rhythms, gloopy rhythms… aside from some occasional detours into static-laced haze and moody meditation, there’s practically always something clicking, clanking, popping, fizzing, tapping, banging or booming away. Restlessness runs throughout the record, but what’s interesting is the way that Leo puts that restlessness in conversation with a sort of post-modern exhaustion, swaddling even his most sprightly drum patterns in rust-colored fog and a nagging feeling that some unseen doom is waiting just beyond the horizon.
The dread is especially tangible on the album’s title track, which sounds like a sun-baked version of tech-step drum & bass—albeit with all of the drums removed. The high-stepping “Jetti,” on the other hand, bears a resemblance to early days of Night Slugs, though Leo has ripped out the label’s signature neon while cranking up the reverb and weaving in some sinister sound design. “Spirit Level” is even livelier, and though its disembodied vocal fragments do lend the track a somewhat gothy vibe, it’s the bubbly drum patterns that are truly striking, largely because they simultaneously evoke both the loopy hypnosis of minimal techno and the most apocalyptic strains of early dubstep.
It’s tempting to parse every song on Cicada Burnt in this fashion, but at the end of the day, doing so is ultimately missing the point. The album will never slot into some neatly defined corner of the hardcore continuum; it’s better suited to rupture that continuum altogether, or at least call into to question its often unyielding rigidity. Breaking that stranglehold may prove impossible, but watching Leo—and his Peak Oil brethren—make the attempt is a genuine thrill.