Digital Leather – Warm Brother « New music, features, reviews, news and free mp3s

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Digital Leather

Warm Brother

[Fat Possum]

6/10

Digital Leather (aka Shawn Foree) has all the energetic key prodding style, morose disposition and cold sarcasm of Gary Numan, but ups the ante with sinister vintage synth jabs, simple mechanical beats and lyrics so unabashedly dark it’s hard to tell how seriously to take them – but then nothing says ‘twisted tongue-in-cheek’ like a Nazi slang album title. Foree’s stiff-jointed vocals are almost expressionless throughout, while the music conveys ‘Warm Brother’’s fraught, manic-depressive trajectory, from the vicious, pounding momentum of ‘Bugs On Glue’, past some upbeat acoustic noodling, complete with cheerful whistling on ‘Hurts So Bad’, right down to the bleakness of ‘My Fame’, a track of nauseous guitar wooziness and synth rasp, surrounding monotonous, bitter ranting about a screwed-up relationship. This should be a tough listen but is somehow strangely accessible.

By Polly Rappaport