Leaving

Leaving are a folk band from Baton Rouge in Louisiana and have a sound that you might imagine comes from the flickering lights and mysterious sounds of the swamps. Their music is sparse, ghostly and beautiful with slow, swirling instrumentation that wraps its fingers around you like tendrils of smoke from a campfire.

Their EP is called, appropriately enough, Ghost House. You can watch a video and grab a track below, and make sure you check out their Bandcamp page to hear the whole thing. - The Mad Mackerel

Leaving don’t write conventional songs. The four tracks on their EP “Ghost House” don’t so much progress as drift. Each song features a textured wall of guitar distortion and reverb, softened by mournful strings and supported by only the slightest of structures. This is rootless music, fitting for its subject matter: the EP is about a ghost that lives in lead singer Jesse Kees’s house.

“Paranormal, Supernatural”, with its hazy instrumentation and distant vocal wail, opens the EP with a certain mysticism that is inviting even to the cynic. “Other/Ghost” is hazier still, and barely has a heartbeat until the 2:30 mark, but that hardly matters once you’ve passed the ghostly induction ceremony of the opener. “Ghost-Reason-Self” maintains the form with a big, lumbering riff that feels like a slowed down version of The Beatles‘ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” [probably among the songs we ought to thank/curse, depending on perspective, for making distortion and white noise legitimate pop music forms in the first place].

All that haze might sound tiresome, but luckily “Lonely Child” closes the EP with some variety: distortion holds out for a little while here, and when it arrives it doesn’t swallow the track. Instead we’re treated to a folk-like acoustic guitar progression backed by a doleful little fiddle part. The atmospheric, layered harmonies on this track bring to mind those spookiest of backing vocals towards the end of Radiohead‘s “Street Spirit”. That’s surely about as ringing an endorsement as a band that writes about ghosts can get.

You can download the whole of “Ghost House” below. Definitely check out “Lonely Child”. - Listen Before You Buy

I’ve never been a big believer in the supernatural. I mean, there are things that happen that defy rational explanation, but I’ve never been one to actively seek out the possibility of ghosts. I mean, if there’s a soul wandering around your attic, what is the sense in provoking it by asking it to show itself, or by bringing groups of curious people onto its turf? Seems like asking for trouble.

Jesse, one of the guys in Baton Rouge band Leaving, however, is less of a Doubting Thomas than I am. The band’s new EP, released at the end of January, is entitled Ghost House – a reference to Jesse’s own home where he tells me, matter-of-factly, a ghost lives. As such, while all members of the band might not be believers like Jesse, they still reference the paranormal in each of the song titles on the four-track EP, and they’ve cultivated a sound to match. It’s eerie and wailing, and sounds like the wind coming through the trees at the end of October.

Ghost House is streaming over at Leaving’s Bandcamp page, and if you want something physical, the band hand makes CDs; you can get in touch with them through their Tumblr page if you want a copy you can have for yourself.

Check out a video below of the band performing “Other/Ghost” – another track from the EP – in Jesse’s living room. It’s gorgeous stuff – enough to soothe even the most troubled of restless souls. - Tympanogram