Music
The best kept secret in music
Press
Probably the easiest way to imagine it is this: Leslie Woods and Dark Mountain Orchid are David Lynch's new private band, at least that would beif the World was fair. They are sitting in one of these red rooms, occasionally a dwarf comes jumping across the scene saying some obscure things backwards; a dark rumble roars from one of the corners, in the other Dennis Hopper squeezes his face into an oxygen mask while moaning the bands Moritate.
Naturally the lyrics' contentis not exactly the right thing for suicide candidates. They are about suffering, more suffering, and you guessed it, the suffering after the suffering.
Sparsely arranged, mysterious and dark, as if Nick Cave was a redneck and even more bad-tempered than he already is anyways. Folk in its darkest style of play, traditional but seductive, precipitous and alluring.
Felix Reek - GQ GERMANY
Listening to Leslie Woods second album Luxury of Sin is akin to being an unseen witness as some horrendous crime unfolds. With each track you're left with the feeling that you've been handed another clue to solving the mystery without ever getting the key to revealing all. If there is an album with a more startling opening song than Train then it's being kept well hidden. Anyone who says music can't send a shiver down your spine hasn't listened to Luxury Of Sin yet. I suggest they do so as a matter of some urgency. I Am What is the kind of country/blues clash that makes you want to sleep with the light on. Much of the credit for that goes to guitarist Bob Deck who creates the same kind of atmosphere that Hitchcock did at Bates Motel with a shower curtain and Janet Leigh. Menace is never very far from the surface of Woods' music but tracks like Sky So Pale make it an hypnotic, addictive menace. It's impossible to avert your gaze from the desolation. However going almost unnoticed is the band, Dark Mountain Orchid. For an album with a cloud hanging over it their touch at times is light, always telling but never overpowering. Luxury of Sin is a sparse album, Camie is a hauntingly bleak love song, set in context perfectly by Sean O'connell's banjo which becomes a third person in the sure-to-be-doomed relationship. As if the emotional wringer hadn't been wrung dry, the album finishes with Save It For Me. Deck frantically searches and eventually finds the depth of feeling that he and Woods so readily find with their voices. It would be easy, too easy perhaps, to become submerged in the maelstrom of emotions that swirl around Luxury of Sin. If that were the case you'd miss the fact that this is a wonderful piece of music, recorded by an artist whose aspirations reach beyond the mundane and whose talent fulfils those aspirations.
Michael Mee - Americana UK
If there is such thing as country-soul, this is it. Songs that are broody and moody as somnolent cottonmouth and just as prone to strike. The voice of Leslie Woods is rich, dark chocolate, afternoon sex, betrayal, loss and faded blooms. The music evokes all of this and more, torrents of honey-toned acoustics and doomed, descending chord sequences. It’s all delicious, but it’s all fucking poison. This is addictive, infectious, “Everyday Fevers” abound and it’s the real soundtrack for something a Bronte wrote on downers, or the ideal soundtrack for ‘Great Expectations’, or both, or neither. This is heady and unwholesomely intoxicating stuff. Approach with caution, you’ll get hooked anyway. - Unpeeled Magazine
Discography
Velve Sky - Leslie Woods - County Line Records
The Luxury of Sin - Leslie Woods and Dark Mountain Orchid - Cult Star Records
Re-issue Velvet Sky/The Luxury of Sin Double CD - Glitterhouse Records-Germany
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Bio
....Ms. Woods has surely been through enough true-life experience to add grit and reality to her siren songs of the wrong side of the tracks. As a teenager, the singer was a prominent figure in Knoxville's first wave punk scene. Later, she became locally famous (or is it infamous?) as a gothic scene maker and fashion plate. Woods was a pioneer of the post-punk, neo rockabilly look that is the current vogue. In fact, one could say that she was a prototype Suicide Girl. If Lydia Lunch sang country songs with the voice of Billie Holiday, well, that might just be an apt description of what Woods delivers. (John Sewell 2005) Listeners are often at a loss to categorize her haunting and erotic music, more often finding comparisons in film and literature. Leslie's songs draw on the rich tradition of southern gothic writing. The moniker, "Appalachian Gothic" is more a reference to Flannery O'Connor than music. The songs that make up The Luxury of Sin are glimpses into a soul so adeptly rendered that they work on the level of film noir. The tales are painted vividly but never in clear view. Though Leslie's strong and breathy vocals are center stage throughout the record, it is her band Dark Mountain Orchid that seals the deal. Pulling from nearly every American musical tradition, they seamlessly weave rock, country, bluegrass, folk and jazz in a way that works effortlessly ..
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