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LEATHERS – Ultraviolet (2024)
Review:
Leathers’ music melts the crystalline precisions of darkwave with the warmth and sweetness of dreamy synth pop. But just when you start to really feel pop’s embrace of sunny vibes on Ultraviolet, the dream fades, and darkwave’s characteristic thematics (borderline social spaces, BDSM eroticism, anxiety and depression) start to prickle your skin. It’s a compelling combination, sonically and emotionally, and Leathers’ songs materialize it to great effect — a pretty good trick for a first LP to pull off so consistently. We shouldn’t be surprised. Shannon Hemmett has been releasing songs under the Leathers band name since 2016, and she has been making music with Vancouver post punk act Actors for even longer (her Actors bandmate Jason Corbett does some work on songwriting and production for Leathers). She’s had time to clarify and refine Leathers’ aesthetics, and her professional work as a graphic designer and tattoo artist suggests the extent to which craft and image are important to her. It shows. Ultraviolet is a considered record, shaped and presented with thought and care. If all that sounds a little too heady, don’t worry; the record’s strong libidinal charge invests it with life, hard, passionate and sometimes dangerous. See “Fascination” — and yes, “see” is the wrong verb when what you really do is listen. But the indicative meaning in that usage of “see” has additional significance here. Hemmett intones, simultaneously cool and hot, “We could stay together / For one last Polaroid.” Is this a photoshoot? Or lovers at more informal play with a camera? The lyrics don’t really clarify: “The camera flashes light / Licking at your skin / Coming into focus / Strike that pose again.” “Licking” is figurally powerful, and its parallelism with “coming” eroticizes the lyrics. Certainly someone is turned on, and the song’s power in part derives from its refusal to locate the arousal precisely — in the photographer, the subject, the singer, the listener. The moment remains maximally open, and Hemmett sings, “Elevate / Penetrate / Fascinate.” “Penetrate” feels at least a little gratuitous, until you clock the tune’s imaginary gambit. Everyone, all those aforementioned parties, wants to get inside the situation, to be the focus of the song’s energies. Hemmett’s interest in the power of image is expressed repeatedly on Ultraviolet, from the cinematic metaphor of “Day for Night” to the more bitter treatment of illusory desires in “Highrise” (“Like a page from a magazine that’s come to life / … Living your best life / You’re never satisfied”). We’re smart enough to know that chasing images of the “best life” is seldom the way toward sustainable satisfaction, but we can’t seem to stop, as a culture or as individual psychologies. We are charmed by excesses, we chase, we go too fast. One of the best songs on the record, “Crash,” dramatizes the excitements of the chase and the disaster that frequently ends it. A synthy bass throb dominates the song, a tense pulse that sets up another flirtation with darkwave gratuity when Hemmett breathily intones, “Punish me for wanting more”; near the song’s end, that gets truncated to “Punish me,” plaintively. That’s another instance of an ostensibly titillating surface doing some substantive work. The full lyric for the couplet is “Punish me for wanting more / I’m the one you can’t ignore.” There’s a smartly compressed articulation of the two-way play with power that informs a lot of dom/sub relationships, and darkwave is at its best when it opens a song’s erotics to wider representation of social forms and to more public dramatizations of power’s flow. The record’s title track pursues a different strategy for expressing that, projecting a dream of desire into a “prison made of glass.” Maybe that’s a reflective surface, or a camera’s lens, but it seems more likely that it’s a phone — the thing we use, perhaps more than any other tool, in our ceaselessly scrolling chase for something akin to happiness, or at least the charge of arousal. To feel alive. But our relations to our phones are indeed a prison. And the truncation in the refrain of “Crash” — to the bare plea, “punish me” — is another way to express the way desire can get converted into a portable carceral space, a deformation of desire that we carry around in our heads, keeping us trapped in unfulfilling pursuits. Leathers proposes an implicit means of escape in the songs themselves, which are exciting and emotionally laden. They provoke, in the best meaning of that word. You’ll want to dance, and not to escape feeling, but to move further into it, as a body feeling real things in real space. That’s the mark of good music. — dusted
Track List:
01 - Ultraviolet
02 - Highrise
03 - Crash
04 - Fascination
05 - Day for Night
06 - Divine
07 - Phantom Heart
08 - Daydream Trash
09 - Runaway
10 - Mary
Media Report:
Genre: dream-pop, synth-pop
Origin: Vancouver, Canada 
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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