There have been some enjoyably mordant bands lately: Editors; Longwave; Muse; to some extent Franz Ferdinand. Chief among them is Interpol, whose Gotham City darkness lets Paul Banks use the words "stabbing myself in the neck" and sound good doing it.
It is with these bands that Leya claim to belong. Certainly, some dark purpose is being enacted here. Grave-robbing? Necrophilia? All On The Black does not sound like Interpol, but like Jeff Buckley, that great cliché of posthumous obsession, singing My Funny Valentine - Chet Baker of course having his own share of glamour-dazzled admirers. There's a lot of echo here, and a lot of wailing desire for - appropriately enough - a departed lover. "I've been dumped for an aeroplane".
The B-sides are, I think, better than the A-side - partly because they make more sense of the Interpol/Longwave comparison. The Start of Something Good, with some nicely deployed feedback, might just - in the long term - be just that.
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