Review: Leprous, Fleece

Choosing an appropriate band name is an important business. Whether you play metal (Slayer) or fey indie (Belle and Sebastian), it acts as a signifier, alerting audiences to form an orderly queue or run for the hills, according to taste. Norway’s Leprous seem determined to make life difficult for themselves, since unwitting punters assume they trade in death metal. Then there are the matching all-black outfits, a la Amplifier, and the unusual stage configuration. With Einar Solberg’s keyboards placed centre front, they could be an early ’80s New Romantic band on dress-down Friday. Guitarist Tor Oddmund Suhrke’s vaguely Phil Oakey hairdo only serves to underline this erroneous impression. Then they amble on and start to play and it’s really quite extraordinary.

Flanked by four large flat screen monitors displaying apparently random impressionistic imagery, Leprous conjure up huge, ferociously percussive and precise soundscapes topped with Solberg’s soaring, full-blooded vocals, which range from dog-bothering falsetto to occasional extreme metal growls. He could sing anything, and probably does. It’s easy to see why those who shoulder the burden of Linnaean musical sub-genre taxonomy have struggled with this lot, generally settling for catch-all ‘prog-metal’ or ‘avant-metal’. Certainly, there’s much here to appeal to those who enjoy Tool or latter-day King Crimson. More adventurous fans of Muse could even find themselves seduced.

The bulk of the set is drawn from their two most recent albums, Coal and The Congregation. This material can be as heavy, intense and polyrhythmic as Meshuggah (thanks in part to those eight-string guitars) or hauntingly beautiful, with layered choral vocals – elements that can often be found within the same song, such as Foe, which wrongfoots the mostly metal audience with its quirky 7/4 time signature, courtesy of phenomenal drummer Baard Kolstad. The rather lovely The Cloak is probably the closest they get to the mainstream, while The Price serves as a slick five minute distillation of the core elements of their sound, served up with sufficient unironic old-skool Judas Priest synchronised headbanging to keep the looming shadow of hipster math-metal at bay. They conclude with the epic The Valley, which leaves the audience attempting to sing its towering chorus and, perhaps, reflecting on why it is that Norway’s black metal scene has spawned some of the most interesting and creative music being made today, from the thrilling prog-metal of Enslaved through the self-styled ‘blackjazz’ of saxophonist Jorgen Munkeby’s Shining to dark ambient experimental collective Ulver: a list to which we must now add Leprous.