Dominique Leone

First known as a Pitchfork music critic, this champion of experimental noise and classic pop unites both on a debut album that bypasses the Norwegian space disco of label co-owner Hans-Peter Lindstrøm. Instead, the Texas-born, San Francisco–based multi- instrumentalist and producer subverts his university-honed melodicism with darkly whimsical deviance -- tricky time signatures, screaming progrock guitar solos, mischievous musique concrète, and squelchy synths. At the heart of these labyrinthine freak-outs are delicate songs about relationship problems sung in a bashful tenor that exposes the beauty in his beast.
--Barry Walters - SPIN

San Francisco-based singer/multi-instrumentalist/producer Dominique Leone bows with a leftfield-pop classic. This self-titled debut sounds as if it were labored over for years, after immersion in the zenith of prog-rock, avant-garde composition, and art-pop mavericks. The 11 songs here abound with unexpected transitions, unusual electronic embellishments, and melodies of unearthly beauty and intrigue. Leone’s expressive voice by turns recalls Greg Lake, Adrian Belew, and Brian Wilson, craftily augmenting his shape-shifting, spine-tingling compositions. What Battles has done for math rock, Leone is doing for prog-pop: giving it a kitsch-free futuristic thrust that sets the standard for 21st-century practitioners of the genre.
9/10
--Dave Segal - XLR8R

Considering the litany of literate talking-point touchstones that filter their way through the twisted pop phantasmagoria of Dominique Leone's self-titled debut, the inaugural release on Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's Strømland imprint — for starters, the big-league melodicism (and restlessly conceptual thrust) of Brian Wilson, Todd Rundgren, and XTC; the whimsical arcanity of the Canterbury scene; the brutalist cacophonics of Boredoms; and over a decade's worth of post-IDM exploration and electro-dance rejiggering, from Cornelius to Matmos to Ellen Allien, not to mention the conspicuously cerebral residue of a pedigreed classical background — it's perhaps a no-brainer that it ends up sounding like very little except for itself. What's more surprising is that it's also remarkably cohesive — despite a seemingly limitless outpouring of ideas and a penchant for sudden stylistic left turns (including jarring noise barrages) comparable to the convoluted neo-prog of the Fiery Furnaces (and, at times, Of Montreal) and an occasionally manic, giddy energy that recalls the day-glo pastiche work of Dan Deacon and the Go! Team, the album generally avoids merely refracting its cripplingly broad influence roster into a formless, indulgently esoteric hodgepodge. It's held together in part by a consistently dense, garishly glossy sonic aesthetic that layers buzzy, metallic keyboards and guitars around Leone's grittily processed voice, which is often multi-tracked into high, queasy, saccharine harmonies in a malformed take on his beloved Beach Boys, with frequent electronic disruptions of varying obnoxiousness. That may not sound very appealing, and, admittedly, it's not a style that makes for particularly easy listening, but it's an effective, intriguing, and distinctive one nevertheless. By juxtaposing such a willfully "difficult" approach with the surprisingly traditionalist popcraft that lies at the heart of most of these songs (and they are songs, albeit often encumbered as much by bizarre structures and knotty harmonies as they are by textural zaniness), Leone isn't just screwing around with thwarted accessibility for its own perverse, limited ends, but seems rather to be genuinely striving for new ways to integrate pop melodics, unorthodox compositional structure, and avant-garde sonics into a workable whole.

The album presents a range of approaches to this project, with varying degrees of success: "Duyen," the cheerily chugging "Goodbye" (which could pass for We Are Your Friends-era Simian), and the unexpectedly gorgeous closing piano ballad, "Conversational," are relatively straightforward pop songs, and quite lovely ones too, with little or no structural disruption, though they're in keeping with the rest of the album production-wise. On the other end of the spectrum, "Kaine" and "Claire" are so structurally disjointed as to verge on sonic collage, their through-line melodies all but obscured by shards of noise and shifting rhythms. Epic-length centerpiece "The Return" attempts to bridge these two approaches with only middling success — it has a decent enough recurrent refrain that passes through untold iterations before descending into an extended miasma of mindless frippery, but as a whole feels plodding and pedantic. Quite the opposite is true, however, of "Nous Tombons Dans Elle," the album's weirdest, poppiest, and by far best track, an utterly baffling, utterly infectious multi-part bundle of boundless cutesy energy that packs in pretty much every sound we've heard along the way, helped along by a couple of killer dance beats. Oh yes, dance beats. Given that electronic dance music is routinely allowed far greater liberty in sound and structure than any comparably popular style — somehow dance beats seem to make a lot of things more palatable — this may be the most viable solution to the particular quandary Leone seems to be investigating here. Perhaps he'd consider it a cop-out on the experimentation front, but it would be great to hear him take some cues from his label boss and just do a lot more like this. In any case, this is a striking, accomplished debut that hints at whole new realms of possibility, and an album that should prove absolutely fascinating to anybody able to tolerate it.
-K.Ross Hoffman - All-Music Guide

Despite the name, Dominique Leone is very much a guy. He’s bearded, thinning on top, and kinda looks like the actor who plays Michael McDonald in the Yacht Rock mockumentaries. The resemblance is appropriate: If he didn’t dump extreme feedback and other disruptions into his bustling arrangements, this smooth-crooning San Franciscan could be kicking out the cuddly Kenny Loggins jams with an ease that Panda Bear and other current kudos-earning indie dudes couldn’t muster. A former Pitchfork critic, Leone holds a music degree and wields multi-instrumental and composing chops to match. His debut disc is the first album from Norwegian space-disco kingpin Hans-Peter Lindstrøm’s label, yet its dense, often claustrophobic structures typically lack both space and thumping beats. Instead, Strømland evokes proudly hairy progressive rock overflowing with knotty rhythms, chords, and harmonies far beyond the realm of laptop-reliant 21st-century dabblers. It slices up old prog epics and splices them together with heartfelt singer-songwriter moments to create a scary/lovely fusion that would be pretty much unprecedented if not for a few similarly amazing mid-’70s Todd Rundgren LPs.

Fond of keyboard riffs that rise and fall like merry-go-round horses, Leone spins carnivalesque tunes as bright as his will to subvert their sunshine is strong: Despite their one-man choirs, his songs’ unconventional structures and severe mood swings circumvent reliable choruses. Sung sweetly over simple electronic piano and synth strings, closing cut “Conversational” delivers the album’s single uninterrupted stretch of unabashed gorgeousness. Before he reaches that serene destination, though, Leone takes musical hairpin turns with such mischievous glee that you can visualize the Road Runner blithely zipping across jagged mountain highways as Wile E. Coyote tumbles off cliff after cliff. That’s the kind of record this is: cartoony and chaotic and perversely cute. - The Village Voice

For anyone who's enjoyed Dominique Leone's writing at Pitchfork over the years, it's pretty fascinating to listen to the San Francisco-based Texan's self-titled debut full-length, which follows his self-titled Feedelity EP. You can hear his beloved Brian Wilson and Harry Nilsson in the harmonies (for Nilsson, think of "Without You" and check out the first section of "Blist," parts of "Claire," or gorgeous album closer "Conversational"), his prog, elecrtro, disco, ABBA fixations elsewhere. (We tried forcing in a Scott Walker mention because his review of the The Drift was so supreme, but no dice.)

The 11-track collection starts with "Kaine," which opens like an Animal Collective magic-wand explosion, before settling into a spacier overlap of plucked strings, audience claps, backward tones, and some death metal guitar growling, and then relocating to some sort of foreign soap opera dialog samples, etc. That's just part of it. No song follows an easy path, but earlier this week we posted the most straightforward piece, "Duyen," and its telephones, shakers, and walkie talkies. To get a broader sense of the album's ornate constructions, take a listen to the up-tempo, Beach Boys-and-the-kitchen-sink standout "Nous Tombons Dans Elle." - Stereogum

There are two ways of looking at Dominique Leone: as an electronic artist obsessed with pop music, or a pop musician with a serious tech fetish. What makes his debut full-length so appealing is that it matches both descriptions. Leone mixes crafty melody with digital wizardry so smoothly, it's hard to say where one side of his musical personality ends and the other begins. A frequent rock critic (primarily for Pitchfork), Leone has wide range in both taste and background (his press kit calls him "classically trained"). But Dominique Leone doesn't sound like a collection of influences, a sampling of references, or a compendium of ideas. It's impressively organic, with detailed compositions that neither hide artifice nor flaunt it. Leone seems to have eyes in the back of his head, watching pop history while pushing it forward.

The pop history Leone prefers could roughly be described as groups infatuated with sugary melodies, and using the studio to craft and enhance them. Think Beatles, Beach Boys, and ELO, up through Todd Rundgren, XTC, and ABBA. But Leone's buoyant tunes and high-pitched voice are more than mimicry. For every song that sounds like Pet Sounds or Skylarking, there's one that conjures less-predictable comparisons. I often hear the helium-injected whine of Mark Davies of Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 in Leone's singing, and other listeners will find their own touchstones, making Dominique Leone a kind of electro-pop mood ring whose day-glo hues change with each listen.

Leone opens the album with a few seconds of his voice run backwards. This might be the only instance where his singing stands alone-- usually he buries it under layers of sound and processing. But his voice is the center of each tune, and it allows him to make active mixes that never get overly busy, since they're always based on simple vocal melodies. On the delirious "Sim", hyper synths whir past his chorused croons, while in "Duyen" radio samples and ringing phones rhyme with his Jeff Lynne-style hums. The effect is often funny, and even goofy-- take the most contagious piece, "Nous Tombons Dans Elle", which sounds like a club track, a Dr. Demento remix, and a Japanese TV ad rolled into one. There are also moments of noise and abstraction, reflecting Leone's love of figures as divergent as Debussy, Harry Nilsson, and the Boredoms.

Still, the majority of Dominique Leone is sunny pop, and as such suffers a bit from over-consistency. The brightness can become a blinding glare-- skip randomly around the album and it's hard to remember which tune is which. But if the cost of hearing Leone hone his fertile musical approach is a little tedium, that's a fair price to pay. Especially when the reward is the album-ending "Conversational", an aching Beatles-esque ballad that serves as an open-ended farewell on a record worth staying in touch with. - Pitchfork

Dominique Leone is released on Lindstrøm’s Strømland label. That Oslo-based producer’s space-disco is one of the sounds at work here, but the most obvious touchstone is English Settlement-era XTC. One of the things Leone wrote in his recent Listed submission for this site – about Pattern Is Movement’s music reminding him of the UK group’s “stubbornly original song structures and chord progressions” – applies equally well to the 11 tracks presented here. Leone has a knack for writing these pretty, soaring, multi-tracked vocal melodies that give the impression of eternity. In the case of the 13-minute “The Return,” that feeling of inexhaustibility comes from repetition (the chorus consists of the words “High up on top / How do you feel?” and “ba ba ba”), as well as the ambitious chord structure it’s built on. Like some of the other tracks on the album (opener “Kaine” and “Claire”), noisy parts interrupt the song’s prettiness. There’s a special pared-down, purposeful quality to the noise, which is built around piercing or squelchy synth sounds, compressed drums, and static – sort of like a pocket Boredoms. I’m still unsure what the exact purpose of the noise is, and it’s likely Leone thinks it doesn’t need one, but it comes off like a combination palate-cleanser and self-puncturing gesture that keeps Leone from exceeding his reach.

“Nous Tombons Dans Elle” is one of the best songs of 2008, and every surface arrives packed with an incredible amount of detail. At five minutes, it seems hyper-compressed – it could easily go on with the same ideas for twice its length and not wear out its welcome. The keyboard bridge that joins the song’s first and second halves is reminiscent of the Supertramp-via-Daft Punk one in “Digital Love,” and what it leads to is equally exciting – playground-hop with more in common with Ricardo Villalobos than The Go! Team.

“Nous Tombons Dans Elle” is one of the best songs of 2008, and every surface arrives packed with an incredible amount of detail. At five minutes, it seems hyper-compressed – it could easily go on with the same ideas for twice its length and not wear out its welcome. The keyboard bridge that joins the song’s first and second halves is reminiscent of the Supertramp-via-Daft Punk one in “Digital Love,” and what it leads to is equally exciting – playground-hop with more in common with Ricardo Villalobos than The Go! Team.

Few things on the album seem earthly, and this album’s accessibility and joy are a measure of Leone’s accomplishment. Even the album’s grittiest parts (think the supercompressed drums on “Goodbye”) come off as weightless. If Leone’s not in the atmosphere with his buoyant vocals or frothy synths, he’s underwater with gently roiling guitar and Mexican radio samples. Dominique Leone is a “blue” album in this sense – if it never comes down to earth, it’s not condescension, it’s just simple transcendence: Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue as much as XTC’s Skylarking. This is maybe deceptive, because Leone’s music is wholly his own, a sui generis synthesis that pays its dues at it surpasses its precedents. It makes me wish that other indie musicians (the terminology isn’t precise, but it’s the closest I can get to who’ll be listening to the album) would follow his lead. Not in a literal sense, but in the sense of listening to everything – say, Xenakis and Larry Levan and Daft Punk – and not really bothering to distinguish them, either through irony or name-dropping. There’s a lot to be stoked on here. - Dusted Magazine