Grapefruit

With Grapefruit he’s has shown an ability to take the fabric of rock n roll to other dimensions, to surprise, to confound. At times this means it’s pretty heavy going but it’s never boring. It’s wildly ambitious, challenging and wonderful.

Grapefruit is fabulous. It is challenging and it is fun.

Yet it all hangs inexplicably together, thanks to heavy doses of charm and wit, its ability to propel your emotions from thrilled to weepy to lovelorn in a trice--and the promise that Kiran Leonard might grow into a properly important figure in British rock.

Unique and inspiring. [Apr 2016, p.75]

It doesn't always work, but that's what makes Grapefruit live up to its name--the epitome of an acquired taste; one that, when hooked on the intricacies and possibilities of its flavour, opens up so much potential for the future.

Through it all, Leonard maintains an intangible charisma that, along with sustained vulnerability and a knack for keeping the familiar in play while distorting it, has the potential to enthrall.

While the ground it covers is startling and often picturesque, Grapefruit is an album you feel led through, rather than being left to explore or inhabit.

All other songs have excellent moments in them, assuring that Grapefruit is indeed a good album. Had they happened more frequently and with shorter intervals though, we’d be looking at a great one.

Freak-folk currents still run through tracks such as Fireplace, but Grapefruit is more wilful and abrasive than his last effort, 2013’s Bowler Hat Soup.

The brilliant, difficult, 16-minute Pink Fruit features a combination of Leonard’s aggressively mournful vocals, a story about a girl with a squid in her stomach and long periods of general cacophony, all held together with a small, bright riff that keeps returning throughout the song like an old friend. Elsewhere, the meandering feels self-indulgent.

Grapefruit is both excruciating and luxurious in its patchiness.

He cites everyone from Shellac to Boredoms to Kate Bush as influences, while quoting feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow and Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. It takes big balls or hilarious self-delusion to do this, but Grapefruit, pitched somewhere between those two states, just about justifies the aplomb.

Insanely ambitious, or just insane; you decide. [Apr 2016, p.90]