Leader Cheetah

Wed 13th Jul, 2011 in Features

With the release of their much-anticipated second album, Adelaide band Leader Cheetah need some sleep before hitting the road again to tour. The laid-back band of alt-country indie-rockers just finished a relatively-quick run of shows around the country with good friends The Middle East. Neither band comes across as your John-Bonham or Ozzy Ozbornesque party animals but from Leader Cheetah frontman Dan Crannich’s account, they held their own.

“To be honest with you, there were far too many late nights and drinking and all the crap that you would expect playing a bunch of shows with some good buddies,” Crannich told FasterLouder. “But we’re feeling OK. We’re flying back to Adelaide tomorrow and we’ll probably sleep for a few days.”

In between partying with friends, the boys in Leader Cheetah played some shows. With their second album Lotus Skies due to be released soon, Crannich said the national tour had proven a great opportunity to play the new material live and get some feed-back from audiences.

“It was good timing because we’ve been able to play the new stuff live and get out and play it to a whole bunch of people just prior to the album coming out, which has been great,” he said. “The energy has been really good; the audience has been really receptive. On the whole, I think the new stuff was kind of received better than the old stuff, which is a pretty great sign. The bulk of the set was new and then we just played three new songs, it was great.”

Leader Cheetah, especially Crannich’s high-pitched, nostalgic vocals, were compared to the legendary genre-bending song-writer Neil Young after just their first album – 2009’s The Sunspot Letters. It was grand-flattery but Leader Cheetah definitely borrows from Young, among others. That Americana sound that some said the band perfected on their debut is again the dominant flavour on Leader Cheetah’s follow-up but there are plenty of other spices on the menu.

The band has pre-released two sample tracks and on its website and social networking pages, and each covers quite diverse musical territory. On Crawling Up A Landslide Leader Cheetah take listeners back to that country place where you might expect to see Neil Young sitting barefoot on a hay bale. Crannich’s voice will always do that when it’s at its best but the twang in the track’s guitars is the real country hook. There is also the sound of a steel-slide caressed down the strings of one guitar that would have anyone west of Parramatta chewing on straw and rocking in their chair.

On Dark Stands Over the guitars and drums are much more up-tempo. The song is much more The Eagles than Young but there is also a hint of ‘60s surf-rock guitar. A strange combination, yes, but it works. It’s also much tighter than the up-tempo tracks on the band’s debut, which often spiral-off into melodic jams.

“It’s definitely a very eclectic album,” Crannich said. “When you hear it . . . it all sounds like the same band but there are a couple of different flavours going on. There is a bit of ‘50s-sounding rockabilly stuff mixed in there and the big kind of rockers and the more dramatic-sounding melancholy, mid-tempo tracks. I think it was just a natural thing as song-writers and musicians.”

“It’s such a terrible cliché but it was kind of just trimming the fat a bit with the arrangements and just trying to keep it really exciting. There are a few longer tracks on the album – the jam-outs – but that’s kind of mixed in with all different length songs. I think it really was very melody-driven and melody focused. But we tried to give it some spice and flesh it out a bit with some good instrumental stuff around it.”

The new album’s added diversity, Crannich said, could largely be attributed to his brother Joel who plays drums in the band. “On the first album it was pretty much, I kind of wrote all the songs and then the band fleshed them out and turned them into what they ended up being,” he said. “For this album my brother Joel actually, on four or five of the tracks, came up with the initial chords and the melody and the idea, and then we worked on them together.

“So it has been me, I guess, as the driving song writer but my brother Joel has definitely come to the table and helped out a lot, which has also helped really add to the colour of the album and the whole scope of the thing; the pallet has definitely been broadened a little bit by having Joel come up with a couple of songs on the album.”

“Generally (my songs) are probably more melody driven; quite often I’ll come up with the melody without even having a guitar, I’ll just come up with the melody and just write the chords around it. I think Joel’s songs are generally more kind of guitar based songs. We definitely approach song-writing differently. But I think that’s a really good thing, that gives the album something, I think it just gives it a little bit more of an edge over the first album.”

Leader Cheetah play Splendour in the Grass at the end of July before embarking on another national tour in September.

Wednesday 24th August – The Blvd Tavern, Joondalup
Thursday 25th August 25 – Prince Of Wales, Bunbury
Friday 26th August – Amplifier, Perth
Saturday 27th August – Mojos, Fremantle
Friday 2nd September – Karova Lounge, Ballarat
Saturday 3rd September – East Brunswick Club, Melbourne
Friday 9th September – Fowlers, Adelaide
Thursday 15th September – Elsewhere Bar, Gold Coast
Friday 16th September – Alhambra Lounge, Brisbane
Saturday 17th September – Kings Beach Tavern, Sunshine Coast
Wednesday 21st September – Beach Rd Hotel, Sydney
Thursday 22nd September – Transit Bar, Canberra
Friday 23rd September – CBD Hotel, Newcastle
Saturday 24th September – Gaelic Theatre, Sydney