LEAF
Made Into Itself (Suspicious/Hive Records)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger

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Skulls against headboards rather than mood-noise feedback spikes are the only things sure to go bump in the night while partaking of these droid-love rhapsodies. Forged out of haunting, gawking-out-the-window-at-the-rain trip-hop, Made Into Itself is deeply personal, but there's something Spike Lee about it all that harnesses big-city isolation and makes it somehow less apocalyptic. In terms of sequencer prowess this falls somewhere between Front Line Assembly's lighter side and anything in the Warp Records stable that has a few loose ends. "Cut the Leash" comprises a rippled lagoon of summery guitar straight out of the Robbie Blunt School of Come-Hither Smolder as it tees up the Moroccan accents of "Light Blue Morning." Later, under the quiet, psychedelic-breakbeat protection of "Lounge Dwellers," Wick explores his Jello Biafra (actually Prince) side in a rant about artificial intelligence and God. Not that Wick is the only perpetrator of such things, but a little less Bruckheimer flash and more coherence of slant is called for here - if techno is the new underground rock, there isn't time to spare deciphering Purple Rain babbling dressed as eggheadism. On the lighter side, "Coffee Drinker" fully embodies the subject content, Dido-esque acoustic guitars creating a relaxed drive-time ambience, while "Song of Trees" lays in a hammock of unhurried piano for its first half (since it's the closing song, there's the requisite 1.3 minutes of silence before a hidden trip-hop track sneaks in).

[Pick this up at www.hiverecords.com.]

© 2005 - Eric Saeger