SELKIRK brothers Scott and Grant Hutchinson follow up the bittersweet Scottish blues of last year’s The Midnight Organ Fight with a live and acoustic rendition of that startling album, recorded in the heat of Glasgow boozer The Captain’s Rest.
Out goes the weirdness, in come special guests such as The Twilight Sad’s James Graham, Glaswegian scenester Ross Clark and Mice Parade’s Adam Pierce, for bare, ragged, heart-ripping renditions of Frightened Rabbit’s gloriously miserable songs of accursed love.
Starker, darker, sweatier, they are all the better for the rush of live performance.
Where Frightened Rabbit speed ever forward, The Leisure Society invest their arcane debut with wistful longing, kicking back in the more pastoral end of the acoustic spectrum.
Nick Hemming once formed a band in Burton-upon-Trent with Shane Meadows and Paddy Considine, later contributing scores to Meadows’ films A Room For Romeo Brass and Dead Man’s Shoes.
The Leisure Society finds him romantically re-born in a London bedsit with fellow singer Christian Hardy, and what sweet close harmonies their union elicits, embellished by ukulele, mandolin, banjo and pedal steel.
This is English country music as lovely and moving as Mojave 3, never better than on The Last Of The Melting Snow.
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