The Skygreen Leopards – Disciples of California

The Skygreen Leopards
Disciples of California
[Jagjaguwar; 2006] 

In 2001, Bar/None re-released some obscure recordings made in a grade school gymnasium with the key performers being…grade schoolers.  The Langley Schools Music Project captures nine to twelve year old children singing their hearts out to some of the best pop music of the 1960s and 1970s and showing the cynics among us how purely joyful pop music can be.  Of course, you have to suspend cynicism to take pleasure in the out-of-key hollering, the mistimed percussion, and the clumsily collided clave sticks.  But they’re children.  In 2006, Jagjaguwar asks us to enjoy playful warbling, mistimed percussion, and clumsy piano…from grown men.  Grown Men!  The Skygreen Leopards, formed around core duo Glenn Donaldson and Donovan Quinn, really put the Post-Rockist ethos of eschewing music snobbery to the test.  Or, perhaps not.  Is their rhythmically sparse and lyrically eccentric Disciples of California really an experimental folk record that caters to snobs?  It is, after all, on Jagjaguwar.  I say no.  Disciples of California, much like those wide-eyed Canadian children, really taps into the core of pop music: simple songs that make you smile.

Last year, The Skygreen Leopards released a six track EP, Jehovah Surrender, and every track was characterized by squalls of blissfully distorted guitars that practically poured out of the speakers.  It was truly some of the best effects work I’ve heard in quite some time.  So, on first listen, Disciples of California is unexpected.  It’s largely an acoustic affair, and excessively lo-fi to the point that one must wonder if those scrappy Canadian tikes had superior recording facilities.  It is rhythmically sparse with several songs pulling their structure solely from lazily plucked guitars.  Bass lines lumber along with no urgency and nothing about the album would lead us to believe that the Leopards are dedicated to keeping time.  The similarities between this and The Langley Schools’ recordings are numerous: carefree timing, casual recording, but above all an unabashed, childlike enjoyment of pretty, sunny pop melodies.  The lack of complexity in both arrangements and melodies doesn’t take anything away from the music.  Oddly, it is the unvarnished quality that reminds me of the unrestrained enjoyment that can be had when stripping pop music down to its basics.

Though simple, Disciples of California captures some unique beauty that Canadian school children just can’t.  However, this inability is less because of their age and more because of their nationality.  This album radiates Californian charm and, though unique, could easily be called new Americana.  Like The Beachwood Sparks’ or The Byrds’ best moments, the acoustic guitars chime rather than strum. Electric guitars are gentle and reverberate above the acoustics rather than abrasively piercing the moment.  “Egyptian Circus” and “Jesus Was Californian” are perfect examples of these crisp, chiming guitars that soften the longer they reverberate, yielding neither to structured timing nor strict tempo.

Disciples of California is strangely simple.  It is stripped down, fanciful, and unrefined.  Its simplicity doesn’t provide any hiding spaces for the Leopards to conceal their enthusiasm for a pure Californian pop song.  Its stalled and lazy tempo can’t put the breaks on its reverberating charm.  Its lack of complexity in both arrangements and melodies allow for The Skygreen Leopards to sing their hearts out in their own distinctive way.

The Skygreen Leopards – Disciples of California (from Disciples of California)

-Posted by E. Kula