William Dart listens to the new album from British band The Leisure Society, Arrivals & Departures. Songwriter Nick Hemming is the master of melancholia in his lyrics, but the band clothes it all in exquisite alt-pop finery.
The Leisure Society Photo: Paul Hudson (https://www.flickr.com/photos/pahudson) CC BY 2.0
Nick Hemming enjoys doing his sums here, in one of my favourite Frank Loesser songs.
I took quite a fancy to Nick Hemming and his Leisure Society band back in 2009. I can’t remember now whether it was love at first sound or ... at first sight.
Their song 'The Last of the Melted Snow' was honey to ravaged ears and something of an indie hit in Britain at the time. It was a wistful chamber pop waltz, topped, like icing on a fairy cake, by the flute of Helen Whitaker.
Wistful, because it had been inspired by heartbreak on a personal level – Hemming had just broken up with his girlfriend. That may have something to do with the song itself skirting pretty close to that sad but resolute Neil Young waltz 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart'.
But it was more than just a pretty, melancholic triple-timer. It came with an intriguing video by the Turbo collective (a triumvirate of Tom Stokes, Christian Brestrup and Ollie Kristian).
Nine years on, I still get pleasure from it, as I do from the song itself.
Nick Hemming is a true songcraftsman; he knows how to cut, shape and polish those notes.
And The Leisure Society knows how to transfer these skills to the songs of others, including that take on Frank Loesser’s 'Inchworm' above, one of the numbers that the American wrote for the 1952 Danny Kaye movie, Hans Christian Andersen. The Leisure Society recorded it for a 2010 album of indie lullabies titled, Sing me to sleep.
It’s not the only time that these musicians have alchemised a familiar, perhaps too familiar song with their magic wands. If you’d like to eradicate Shirley Bassey’s uber-dramatic version of George Harrison’s 'Something' out of your mind for ever, then The Leisure Society will do it for you, chiselling it down, in its first minute, into a delicate quavering confessional.
I last featured The Leisure Society on New Horizons in 2016.
The occasion was a new album titled The Fine Art of Hanging on, and the title track seemed to be offering an appreciated solution for graceful survival in the very stressful 21st century.
There’s a little apocalypse brewing in its lyrics, but Hemming and his bandmates tint it with urgent repeated notes and ever-rising harmonies – not to mention Nick Etwell’s rousing trumpet contributions which might have breezed in from the local Salvation Army brass band.
The Leisure Society was certainly surviving in 2015 and very well indeed. Their previous three albums attracted swathes of praise from all quarters.
Not only for Hemming’s finely nuanced songwriting. I remember David Honigmann in the Financial Times stressing that we should not forget just how skillful the group’s chamber pop arrangements were.
If 2015’s The Fine Art of Hanging On both hung on and explored new directions, then their latest, Arrivals & Departures, does the same — even if it was generated by the same emotional turmoil that was caught in 'The Last of the Melted Snow'.
This time around the separation has been between Hemming and the group’s flautist Helen Whitaker and the turmoil permeates the album, particularly so in the set’s most immediate song.
Perhaps the clue to this track titled 'A Bird, A Bee, Humanity' lies in Zoe Bread’s video for it, in which the hero walks ceaselessly, often followed by an ominous shadow, ending in a fall from grace into endless repetition.
But do heartbreak and sorrow really deserve to be quite so catchy? Maybe for the flinty hearted, but there are broader issues laid out in the final few seconds of the song.
That song falls firmly in four-four: classic pop meter. But Hemming and musicians don’t desert their favourite triple time. The waltzometer clocks in a number of tracks, but would one have expected less, considering their fondness for a bit of the old 1,2,3?
A roll call that includes one song that seems to sprout from the Sherman Brothers' 'Chim Chim Cher-ee'.
This song, titled 'Be You Whenever' is not the only venture into waltz-time on The Leisure Society’s new album, Arrivals & Departures. And maybe there’s an irony in the fact that a dance which brings two people together is also used to choreograph their separation.
The title number is a case in point. Here, the bare acoustic piano introduction is an integral part of the song, setting up a sort of Eric Satie waltz, perhaps a wannabe Gymnopedie. There’s a twinge of dissonance in the first two phrases, but it soon settles down to white-key simplicity.
As is the expected template with The Leisure Society, it’s picked up by the full band and taken for a whirl. Don’t miss the exquisite coda: a few lines of reflection, accompanied by strings, plucked and bowed.
When you listen to Nick Hemming launching his 60 minutes of Arrivals & Departures you might wonder whether the personal has encroached somewhat on The Leisure Society’s customarily brand of dispassionate.
Perhaps they sense it themselves, when they break from the mould in the song 'Beat of a Drum', searching for not only spiritual re-balancing but also for something in the line of musical solace. In Hemming’s words “a search for a sound, billowing in the nowhere of now.”
To my ears, there’s a flickering of calypso fire here, brimming under what sounds like a conga line to a Bo Diddley beat.
Right at the end, passion in the form of some incendiary guitar, is allowed to flare, but only briefly. And who could not offer silent, or even raucous applause for Brian Eno’s synthesizer simmerings?
As always, Nick Hemming is a master of melancholia. And melancholia is never that far from these songs.
Particularly in the penultimate track, 'You’ve Got the Universe', just before the album ends with the equivocal assurance of 'Ways to be Saved'.
What could be more melancholic for some than the last dance at the Prom, and this is the ambience that runs through 'You’ve got the Universe'.
The almost skeletal opening offers no hint of the languourous 12/8 that sets in, built over a simple shift between two major chords.
The way in which Hemming floats his voice over these structural goalposts is the stuff of heart-tugging.
It ends in a final truth and emotional anchoring as he sings, “Every night feeds the dust” followed by “Every morning breaks untouched.”
Music Details
'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)
'Inchworm' (Loesser) – The Leisure Society
Sing Me to Sleep - Indie Lullabies
(American Laundromat)
'The Last of the Melting Snow' (Hemming) – The Leisure Society
The Sleeper
(Wilkommen)
'Something' (Harrison) – The Leisure Society
MOJO Magazine: Abbey Road Now!
(MOJO Magazine)
'The Fine Art of Hanging On' (Hemming) – The Leisure Society
The Fine Art of Hanging On
(Full Time Hobby)
'A Bird, A Bee, Humanity' (Hemming) – The Leisure Society
Arrivals & Departures
(Ego Drain)
'Be You Wherever' (Hemming) – The Leisure Society
Arrivals & Departures
(Ego Drain)
'Arrivals & Departures' (Hemming) – The Leisure Society
Arrivals & Departures
(Ego Drain)
'Beat Of A Drum' (Hemming) – The Leisure Society
Arrivals & Departures
(Ego Drain)
'You've Got The Universe' (Hemming) – The Leisure Society
Arrivals & Departures
(Ego Drain)
