Leverage Models - Cooperative Extensions
• 2-Song Digital Single & Limited Edition Tour CD (HT044)
Tracklist:
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2.Sweep
I traveled 4800 miles in 72 hours and I'm qualified to write about Leverage Models. Over the next five weeks, Shannon Fields -- the man behind and in front of the curtain -- will hit nearly every road I glided over, playing shows that radiate his absolute nature, or at least the parts he wants you to see. Since moving to upstate New York, and, to briefly encapsulate it, buying a tractor, he has conjured the spirits of a decade in the city and a serpentine life before it. I met him as he vibrated in Stars Like Fleas, a force so flammable the seams couldn't hold from the heat. Something like six years later, he's making the best music of his life. At least I think so.
We've discreetly released his first two collections, named Interim Deliverable and Forensic Accounting, two-word identifiers that truly amount to chants in the electric dark. "Is this where music is headed?" wrote someone in my iChat window when I threw the line of "Cooperative Extensions" to them one morning. All I could answer: "This is where music's always been." Shannon has always had some kind of x-ray vision, I've caught glimpses of it and called it mine over the years. He's had friends by his side since he started hand-making Leverage Models in his attic: D. James Goodwin, Jeff Gretz, Jon Natchez, Matt Lavelle, Trevor Dunn, Kelly Pratt, Alexis Karl, Anthony Lamarca, Jesse Blum, Jim Altieri, and his own brother, Christian.
Click those links and see the village clustered around Shannon Fields, the recipe, and the power of composed sound. When you listen to Leverage Models, you are hearing the in-progress perfection of creation and destruction and creation again. You are hearing what it means to take risks, the kind that you dream about, the standing-naked-in-the-train-station kind. And you know, as you slip into music you can and can't define, that the risk is yours to take. For all my pushing over the years, for the archaeology of records in our basement, I still sit here, hung in time-traveler mode, wishing for you to close your eyes, take my hand, and just go here with me.
"Cooperative Extensions" is the third tumble in the Leverage Models story, the loud and final call before we run toward the defining totem of an album. But you know, and I know, it doesn't always take an album to find love. It doesn't always even take a full song. Sometimes you just see it across the room. Sometimes you accidentally let a song repeat, and, by the turn of the hour, you've threaded some wild new anthem into your understanding of everything in front of you. Leverage Models is that perfect accident. "Cooperative Extensions," and its companion "Sweep," is a single that bears the weight of the new-old universe of Shannon Fields. I swear it's easy and I swear it's hard. That spectrum in between is just sweet, sweet music.
Our fascination has two shores, as we unveil everything Leverage Models alongside Mr. David Laurie and the London-based label Something In Construction. The European home of Leverage Models (also home to Memory Tapes, Loney Dear and more), David juggles surprise, vibe, and time zones alongside Hometapes. Set to Shannon's music and his binding presence, set between us southern-turned-west-coast kids and one of the UK's most vibrant musical brains -- anything you can imagine is probably true.
-Sara Padgett Heathcott, Hometapes
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