Kentucky Slang & Detroit Grit: Leopold and His Fiction

There’s something odd about the air when Leopold and his Fiction occupies its space, it’s fresh but still smells like something that’s been sitting on your daddy’s record shelf in an uncovered beat up slip cover. The band’s songs are a strange brew of Kentucky slang mixed with Detroit grit, at times sounding like a sober Perry Ferrell, all the while attempting to find balance between pop and bottleneck. The duo is comprised of drummer and Berkeley graduate student Ben Cook, and guitarist/vocalist Daniel Toccalino, both of whom bring their hometown characteristics to the collective.

“She Ain’t Got Time” successfully sets the band’s pace at a high level, one which it primarily stays away from; though in doing so the song relates itself to something familiar to Toccalino’s Detroit home and the band’s which have risen from the city in the past decade. “Go On and Have My Way” connects in a manner specifically associated with a bluesier rock musician along the lines of Robert Randolph. Together the duo provides a fairly accurate depiction of where modern rock might be headed; second generation Strokes fans desperately seeking the importance of .38 Special; which isn’t really a bad place to be.