Dan
Mutch was reading a lot of H.P. Lovecraft when he named the new album by The
Leg Chromatic Perversion. The psychedelic-sounding title is taken from a line
in Lovecraft’s story, The Colour Out of Space, though any influence Lovecraft’s
mid-expanding fiction might have had on the manic folk-punk jug-band’s fifth
album has been lost to the mists of time.
“Chromatic
Perversion was a song we did as a spoken-word thing that was originally going
to be on the album,” Mutch explains. “It ended up not making it on, but I still
liked the title.”
Released
this weekend on the Leith-based Tenement Records, Chromatic Perversion sees The
Leg’s core trio of Mutch, cellist Pete Harvey and drummer Alun Scurlock expanded
to incorporate guitarist James Metcalfe as well as the prodigal’s return of
bassist John Mackie from Mutch’s first band, Khaya.
This finds
the fleshed-out five-piece galloping through the record’s ten songs with a
frenetic abandon married to an appealing jauntiness that nevertheless retains
The Leg’s mercurial edge of yore.
“There
are some songs on the record that are about ten-years-old, but didn’t quite fit
with anything else,” says Mutch. “I became quite obsessed with some of the
other songs, and have tried to record them in different ways, but they weren’t
working, and I wasn’t sure where to go with them. But John coming back after
thirteen years, and then James coming in, has really opened things up, and things
have evolved into the really interesting place where we are now.”
Mutch’s
musical evolution began in Chepstow, the Welsh town on one side of the Severn
Bridge. This was close enough to Bristol’s bustling music scenes for a young
Mutch to know what was going on, but isolated enough for him to plough his own
furrow from an early age.
“Looking
back, I think I was always obsessed with pop music. I used to watch Top of the
Pops, singing along with my sister, tape recording it, buying singles with
instrumental B sides. I made a guitar out of cardboard, and then my step-dad
had a real guitar. I was always into the Beatles, and then Nirvana came along.
That was a real life-changing moment, and sounded like what I was looking for.
It took a heavy sound and reconstructed it with a different kind of atmosphere
to anything I’d heard before. I suppose there was an angriness there as well
that I liked.”
While
it’s not difficult to relate the intensity of The Leg’s music to Nirvana, Mutch’s
approach stems in part as well from being cut off from any kind of scene.
“Bristol
was only over the water, but I couldn’t relate to what was going on there. It
was easier to relate to Nirvana. I played in bands at school, and when I got
home would make recordings with a ghetto blaster. When I left school I just
wanted to be in bands. I didn’t want to do anything else.”
Mutch
moved to Edinburgh in the mid-1990s aged seventeen. After initially recording
solo on a 4-track, he eventually found himself fronting Khaya. The band
released records on the SL label, and recorded two John Peel sessions before
evolving into Desc.
“I
wanted things to be darker and more spacious,” says Mutch. “It was time to take
a different path, and we had a good sound, but a lot of things went wrong. It
was almost like we were cursed.”
Morphing
into The Leg, the stripped-down trio of Mutch, Harvey and Scurlock self-released
their Forest of Dean inspired debut record, the vinyl-only 8 Songs by the Leg,
in 2006.
“That
was a more magical and other-worldly thing than Desc. I had a dream-like
picture in my head, and that record was everything that Desc should’ve been.”
By the
time the Leg released the “more grungy” What Happened to the Shrunken Tina
Turner? in 2009, they had also hooked up with former Dawn of the Replicants
vocalist Paul Vickers. Four Paul Vickers and The Leg albums have been released
thus far, including the recent Jump, also out on Tenement. Without Vickers, The
Leg released An Eagle to Saturn in 2012 and Oozing a Crepuscular Light a year
later. These were both released on Song, by Toad Records, with a slow-burning Chromatic
Perversion brewing away ever since.
“I would
describe Chromatic Perversion as essentially a pop record,” says Mutch. “The
Leg have quite a strange sound, and it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but for
anyone who likes strange-sounding songs, this is probably quite a good place to
start.”
Such
off-kilter oddness fits the record’s barn-storming cover of High on a Rocky
Ledge, written by Moondog, the much revered American composer and musician
formerly known as Louis Thomas Hardin.
“To me,
that’s a total pop song,” Mutch says. “We don’t normally do covers, but
whenever we got together we kept coming back to it.”
A similar
sense of wilful singularity drives Mutch’s own work.
“I think
a way to understand the Leg is that we come from a place informed by the
Beatles and Nirvana, though we don’t particularly like a lot of pop music. Out
of that, we have the benefit of having worked together for a long time, so
we’re able to to do what we do and explore things the way we do to make
something we enjoy.”
Chromatic
Perversion by The Leg is released tomorrow on Tenement Records.
The Herald, February 22nd 2020
ends
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