LÉON
Apart
BMG
Listen Below
Conventional wisdom says that a breakup hits the person who was abandoned the hardest. But sometimes, when you’re the one who agonizingly decided to blow up the union, the tortuous miles you trek through its blast radius in the days, months and sometimes years afterward can be more dark and contemplative than if you were the one who was left behind.
You have to dissect your decision, identify and examine your faults, and prepare yourself for the possibility that “the grass is always greener” was a huge mistake that will scar you for the rest of your life.
This is the jagged internal territory LÉON examines with determined honesty inside her forthright second full-length album, appropriately titled Apart. With eleven songs pivoting between folky chamber pop, wistful piano balladry and low impact synth pop, the Swedish-born singer-songwriter looks back through a twilight hue at a relationship from which she chose to walk away.
Acoustic guitar-driven opener “Head And Heart On Fire” details the initial attraction that started the romance (“There was something kind of magic / The way you walked in through the door / Through a crowded room you caught me / And I swear my feet stuck to the floor”). But cloaked in hindsight, it’s a happy memory now darkened with heavy regret (“I think you had me from that moment / I wish I never let you go”), which is prevalent in many of Apart’s offerings.
Big, unanswerable questions about love thread through many of the songs as well, like the string-laden and pulsing “And It Breaks My Heart.” Written about an emotional goodbye after a post-breakup dinner with her ex that was, unsurprisingly, tinged with remorse (“And if I only could / I'd go back in time / Take back every word / Say, ‘I've changed my mind’”), LÉON queries about love’s wafty impermanence over a synth-backed beat (“Oh, where do love go / It's right in your hands, then suddenly gone / Oh no, nobody knows where it disappears / And it breaks my heart”).
Instead of trading in breakup generalities or lovelorn clichés, LÉON offers mature personal narrative in many of Apart’s songs as an invitation to voyeuristically examine her self-professed faults. In the mid-tempo “Crazy/Stupid,” she reveals that sometimes in relationships her pledges are meaningless (“Making promises that I never keep / And I do it to you every time / I’m so out of my mind”) while also admitting to playing games (“I’m so selfish / Let you get a little bit too close / Then I’m running away”).
Lyrically, Apart is a much more introspective and focused album journey than her confident self-titled full-length debut last year. With this collection, LÉON has a singular snapshot of time to focus on and opens up the aperture on this bruising period of her life. The hopeful ballad “In A Stranger’s Arms” divulges her post-breakup coping mechanisms familiar to many who have also walked the same road (“Spending money on things I know I don't need / Cut my hair to change me / I'm smoking again”).
And in the title track that closes Apart, accompanied by solo piano, she solemnly details a low point in her breakup’s aftermath (“Looking in the mirror / I don’t like the one I see / I can’t help it these days that’s just how I feel”) while simultaneously worrying about herself (“And I thought I’d find myself without you / Now I know nothing at all”) and contemplating the damage she might have done (“Are you sleeping easy? / Do your friends talk shit about me? / Maybe I don’t need to know”).
LÉON delivers this deep dive into her crisis of self with her signature honey-colored and pointed emotive vocal style—at times elegantly delivering hurt that’s often married with a communal backdrop of orchestral strings, pastel choral background vocals and gauzy layers of instrumentation to lift her up and ease the pain. At times, she beautifully employs her higher vocal register to flutter out fear and longing (“In A Stranger’s Arms,” “Tell Me”) instead of opting for a breakthrough tormented wail to convey grand realizations.
Like in the choral-backed “Die For You,” where LÉON crescendos a dramatic moment of loneliness (“I’m losing all my senses every night / Darlin’ don’t you know that I die / I die for you / I don’t want to want somebody new”) by reaching up for a more fragile vocal delivery instead of a full-throated cathartic howl that would have broken through the darkened hue of her dour 20/20 hindsight.
But utilizing an emotional vocal outcry to denote the anguish of a particular moment is not the palette LÉON chooses to paint with yet as an artist. This was her breakup journey and to deliver a gorgeous and honest snapshot of this period, perhaps LÉON doesn’t want to scream and shout about all the pain.
Grappling with difficult life choices and trudging through the muddy waters of self-discovery is hard enough—on Apart, it’s clear LÉON is instead choosing to unearth the beauty inside all that madness.
Notable Tracks: “And It Breaks My Heart” | “Apart” | “Falling Apart” | “In A Stranger’s Arms” | “Seventeen”
Note: As an Amazon affiliate partner, Albumism may earn commissions from purchases of vinyl records, CDs and digital music featured on our site.
LISTEN: