Kiran Leonard
Bowler Hat Soup
Release Date: Nov 12, 2013
Genre(s): Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock
Record label: Hand of Glory
Music Critic Score
How the Music Critic Score works
Album Review: Bowler Hat Soup by Kiran Leonard
Exceptionally Good, Based on 4 Critics
Based on rating 5/5
In less enlightened times, Kiran Leonard would have been shanghaied by physicians who’d saw off the top of his head as a means of discovering how on earth he does what he does. Either that, or he’d have been torched at the stake. The Oldham-based singer-songwriter- multi-instrumentalist is still only 17 years old, for Christ’s sake; but it’s worth reminding yourself that the swarming deeps, lo-fi thumbprints and careworn erudition of Bowler Hat Soup – released in a limited run of 500 vinyl copies – would represent a career-best achievement for a preternatural craftsman of any age.
Based on rating 4/5
Before we go any further, let’s take a minute to reflect on what most of us would have been spending our days as a 17-year old doing. Chances are it involved working on an awkward, borderline terrible patois that saw you neither get served at your local pub nor make any progress with the opposite sex, all the while wondering what a UCAS point was and why you needed so many of the damn things to escape to your faraway city of choice once you’d passed your A-levels.Chances are you definitely didn’t spend it creating – in the artist’s own words - a ‘hexadecagonal pseudo-fortress of occasionally caustic and semi-illiterate pop nonsense’. But then again, perhaps Oldham’s Kiran Leonard isn’t your average teenager.
Based on rating 8/10
Seventeen-year-old Kiran Leonard has brewed up an internet fuss. Inspecting the components of said fuss, it appears he has done so primarily by being a 17-year-old who has brewed up a fuss. It all works in reverse order, these days. Still, here’s a question: at a time when the world and its musical wonders dangle within fingertips’ reach, why listen to some pepped-up wet-nosed Oldham teen run the gamut of emotions from arrogance to bravado? Wouldn’t that be silly of us? Sure.
Opinion: Excellent
Kiran Leonard, a young multi-instrumentalist brimming with talent and ambition who sounds like Thom Yorke in the middle of a West End theatre run, uses 24 instruments on his debut album – including a radiator. He positively boasts of his wide-eyed quirkiness. In the past, with projects such as ‘The End Times’, the Manchester musician has sung about “synchronised outer space attacks and a plethora of natural disasters” in a lengthy track that neared the half-hour mark.