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Auckland musician - and, full disclosure, RNZ staff member - Leonard Powell makes songs defined by their amiability. He’s a conversational lyricist, and his debut is brimming with confidence; surprising when you learn he’s relatively new to playing guitar, understandable once you know about his past as a hip-hop muso. On Slow Mover he launches a charm offensive.
In the liner notes, Powell says he mostly wrote these tunes on an acoustic guitar given to him just before the COVID outbreak. During writing sessions he could barely play them start to finish.
Powell is a naturally gifted singer, if occasionally wobbly, but his main strength is a gift for writing broad hooks. The chorus to ‘Adam’ has an anthemic heft, and on the ballad ‘Inside Voices’, he meanders down flights of fancy about his girlfriend, but keeps bringing it back to a bold starting melody.
Slow Mover was produced by Tom Broome, who also played drums on most of its songs, as he has done for Tami Neilson, Aaradhna, Avantdale Bowling Club, and many more. He’s also mixed or engineered for some of those projects, and his website reveals a growing number of newer artists he’s produced.
It sounds like Tom guided Powell as he learned a new instrument, and his production is uncluttered and reasonably free of effects, suiting the unfussy music.
‘Age’ riffs on the politics of ageing. Another is called ‘Parallel Parking Phobia’, about trying to park your car in what Powell sarcastically calls “NZ’s most liveable city”.
The lyrics here are by and large very literal, often comically so. I thought of Flight of the Conchords more than once while listening to Slow Mover. Powell is carving out his own quaint niche, though, and there’s a real zest and force of personality to the music here that suggests greater things to come.
