World Leader Pretend – Punches

World Leader Pretend – Punches / 2005 Warner Bros / 14 Tracks / http://www.wlpband.com / http://www.warnerbros.com / Reviewed 14 November 2005

He opening beat to “Bang Therapy” really resounds heavily of sixties, girl-group acts; the vocals laid down by Keith on the track seem to mix together equal parts Death Cab For Cutie, Rufus Wainwright, and Soul Asylum. The style of music laid down by the rest of the band really seems to draw together much of the same eclectic sound; the sixties-influenced synth lines during “Bang Therapy” seem to be drawn from The Verve (which in turn were copped wholly from a Bond movie). The much-more contemplative “Dreamdaddy” has an authoritative Keith taking an even larger role in the overall sound of World Leader Pretend.

With this track, the much more sedate instrumentation of the band still finds a few places in which to combat Keith’s vocals, but World Leader Pretend really seems to coalesce around the ever-increasing vocals put forth here. This track moves up in the chronology a few years and seems to have all of the endearing qualities of Easy-Edison Lighthouse or an act like The Carpenters. The other major tack approached by World Leader Pretend during their “Punches” has to be a late-nineties brand of alternative rock popularized by acts like Rusty, Sloan and Blur; tracks like “Bang Theory” has a minor bit of that influence, but it is really during “New Voices” that this sound is fully cultivated. The incorporation of synths and finger-snapping on “Punches” adds the perfect amount of tender sound to what is in reality a highly chaotic and raucous track. For a track like “Punches”, one has to imagine Radiohead working with Queens of the Stone Age.

“Punches” (the album) is much more of a cohesive recording than the different-styled tracks would allow people to recognize; what World Leader Pretend really do here is create a narrative, a story that they then lead listeners through for the entire 52 minutes of the disc. “A Horse of a Different” is perhaps the most intense track that World Leader Pretend cuts for the track; the arrangement that leads off the track before Keith can add eir two cents does more in the first 30 seconds than the three minutes of the rest of the track could accomplish. This is saying a lot, as the interplay between Keith’s vocals and the instrumentation on the track is some of the most euphonic material on the album. Swirling eddies of different influences unite to create World Leader Pretend, a band that defies labels.

Top Tracks: A Horse of a Different, Dreamdaddy

Rating: 6.7/10

[JMcQ]