REVIEW: Leo Sawikin — Row Me Away (LP)
Evaporating noise soon gives way to the sturdiest of beats in the opening bars of Leo Sawikin’s “Born Too Late,” the lead single from his new album Row Me Away, but the conceptual nature of this opening track doesn’t completely encapsulate the unpredictable feel of what the following songs will offer.
There’s a clandestine pop sensibility buried within the bones of this single, much like its psychedelic-tinged electropop crossover “Golden Days (Far Out At Sea),” but it’s not rooted in the post-punk a lot of other artists and bands are utilizing in their music right now. It’s almost childlike in its innocence, luring us deeper into the vulnerable subtext of the lyrics and music as only a player of Sawikin’s immense skill could.
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“A Whole World Waiting” has the most conventional cosmetic disposition of any song in the first half of Row Me Away, its gliding groove and effervescent harmonies don’t limit the avant-garde stylization of the lyrics here at all. Sawikin has a very acerbic mentality from the time we first encounter his voice in “Born Too Late” well through the duration of the tracklist, but he does allow himself to get a little surreal in his internal thoughts via “If I Stayed,” one of my favorite songs on the album. There’s no rigidity in the construction of this piece; there’s just emotion specifically as we would find it unfiltered and ready to bring us into the heart of he who bears it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5kHLG3LKhg
“All Just a Drop” flirts with some fairly experimental parameters in the style of Howard James Kenny or even a Parker Longbough, but its atmospheric melodies are what tether it to the uniquely Leo Sawikin sound fans of The Chordaes are more than well-versed in by now. “You Love Too Much” and “Tell Me There’s An Answer” are conceptually and sonically inseparable, the yin to the other’s yang and much the foundation for the progressive energy we find in Row Me Away’s the latter act. There’s not a lot of theatric dribble getting into the music, but there’s no denying the epic sense of justice this singer wields when he’s describing the evening of a playing field so vividly with his metaphorical lyricism.
While Row Me Away ends on a very somber note with the absolutely daring “Wasting My Whole Life” and “Take What You Want,” I don’t think its story is purely for those who are feeling a little down this fall. Contrarily, there’s a lot of comfort in the rhythm of this music that you don’t hear in a lot of records solely because of an artist’s unwillingness to get this personal, which isn’t a problem for Leo Sawikin. He goes there in this LP, stressing no element of vanity and presenting us with everything his sound can consist of when he’s on his own, and from where I sit his efforts have resulted in an album far more complete and thought-provoking than anything he had recorded prior.
Colin Jordan
