Les Keye touches on the poignant and the personal with folky ‘20 Greenlea Road’
Les Keye shares his first album in nearly two decades.
Les Keye’s newest endeavour, 20 Greenlea Road, is an ambitious album in scope; putting to verse the divorce of parents, deep family ancestry, century-old battles and religious persecution. Yet musician Keyes handles each with the delicacy and glimmering, pop-inflected folk they deserve.
The record opens with Phantom Limb, a haunting slice of heartland folk that builds from paper-fragile ballad to indie stomper. Greenlea Road, meanwhile, is sublime folk music set to an acoustic guitar and melancholia.
Barely Dividing deals with the concept of hindsight in a broken relationship, merging Keye’s now-established sound with something almost alternative, bordering on psychedelic – making for one of the best tracks on the album. Personal roots blur further with the roots genre, in the poignant Cold Cold Land and Hiding in the Shadows, the latter of which makes meticulous use of the guitar, showing militaristic precision.
Super 8 is one of the more elusive tunes on 20 Greenlea Road, somewhere between Wild West score and John Mellencamp. The penultimate track, meanwhile – Making for Whitewood (which portrays 1798’s Battle of Raffin Hill) is nothing short of brilliant. Combining the guitar tones, melodies and historic accounts of Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac and Loreena McKennitt, Keye strikes diamond in this four-minute gem.
20 Greenlea Road closes with They Do Not Like Our Name, referring to Keye’s great-grandfather, who changed the family name after facing persecution for sounding ‘too German’. Though the lyrics are far from subtle, the track rolls on with all the misty-eyed nostalgia and hypnotism of a deep dream.
Les Keye’s first album in nearly two decades covers a lot of ground, musically, snaking from Tom Petty’s Southern Accents through to shoegaze-y Barely Dividing, classic ballads and folk-pop, jangle and all. It’s a treasure trove of tunes as deep artistically as they are in content, touching on aspects of Keye’s life laid bare for all to poke at. 20 Greenlea Road is a gentle record, but by no means is this a critique. The subject matter has been treated with real reverence and care, something which, even better, trickles down into the song writing and production, too.