‘The Ornament’ is the first track to be released from Gold Leaves’ upcoming album of the same name, which will be released on August 16 on Hardly Art. You may recognise Grant Olsen, the beardy fellow behind Gold Leaves, as being fifty per cent of Arthur & Yu, and it’s a decent bet that if you’re a fan of their sixties-tinged sound, you will also be a fan of this.
Though swimming decidedly in the same musical pond as Arthur & Yu, Gold Leaves’ sound is fuller, and in ‘The Ornament’, a haunting Wurlitzer-esque organ, and an upbeat drum line provide perfect counterpoint to Olsen’s melancholic reedy vocals. It’s finely-crafted, and you can hear the subtle layers well, but there’s still something delightfully rugged about it which seems to engender a feeling of intimacy. That kind of calculated cosiness on record is difficult to pull off convincingly, but Olsen had help, with jobbers including Jason Quever from Papercuts, percussionist Ben McConnel and Thao Ngyuen amongst those lending a hand.
The vocal in the middle-eight section is delightfully off-kilter, and highlights Olsen’s talent with a quirky melody line, though it really is the can’t-teach-it timbre of his voice that gives the song its goosebumpy power. His voice sounds at times very similar to another facial hair enthusiast – Robin Pecknold from the Fleet Foxes – and ‘The Ornament’ displays a similar skill to many FF songs for its ability to sound like something that you’ve heard before, but like, maybe a really really long time ago – a sensory memory that you can’t quite place.
After the theft of a bag containing the notebooks and a laptop that held the seedlings for the songs off the album, Olsen was forced to start again, and the process was still plagued by creative problems. In the end it was only through putting aside his ambitions for the album, that he could truly focus on making it, he says: “I kept scrapping music because I wanted to make some kind of grand statement… When I opened myself up to just trying to make a record that still had meaning, but was less grandiose in the overall scheme of things, I started being a lot more productive.”
Something of this creative honesty comes through on ‘The Ornament’, and if the rest of the album matches its quietly prodigious musical skill, we are in for a treat.
Gold Leaves: The Ornament by victoriamttx
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