Artist To Watch: Leopold And His Fiction

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Making Music fit to drink several beers to, and hailed by the press as the new White Stripes, Bay Area-Rockers Leopold and His Fiction, hammer home that Midwest roadhouse sound.

For a two-piece, they’re highly innovative, and bend the genres of Rock, Blues, and Country like the White Stripes, The Stroke, and Hank III having a screaming match.

Leopold and His Fiction – “Go On Have My Way”

Bio:
Leopold and his Fiction is a drum/guitar duo, fronted by the Detroit-based Daniel Toccalino, who have an affinity for a combination of low-fi country, blues, jazz, and rock sounds. But the comparison doesn’t capture Leopold and his Fiction adequately for at least one immediately obvious reason: jazz-trained, Kentucky-born drummer Ben Cook can play. (Sorry, Meg.) And what’s more: Leopold mixes the country/blues/jazz/rock genres in a way that makes the band sound both distinctly larger than their drum/guitar/vocals combination and uniquely dynamic.

The album’s first track, the grungy, rock n’ roll “She Ain’t Got Time,” sets the tone for the rest of the album. It’s lyrically entertaining and instrumentally tight, as Toccalino sings “I’ll be your baby tonight” over Cook’s varied straight-ahead beats. “Gonna Be Your Boy” showcases the duo’s country know-how. A twangy slide guitar glides over a steady 12-bar blues progression.

Roles are reversed throughout this tune: the guitar acts as a rhythm section by pounding down the 12-bar blues and the drum functions as a bass guitar, which Toccalino describes in an interview with the San Francisco Bay Guardian. “[Cook] fills up a lot of the low end” by artfully subbing in where the bass is “supposed to go.” “Miss Manipulation” is the mark of the duo’s well-rounded capability. The song fades in to reverberating slide guitar lines which float on the chords of an acoustic guitar, while the drums diminish to only muted symbols, creating a song as pretty as anything My Morning Jacket ever wrote. Quite simply, Leopold and his Fiction have created an coherent, solid album as dynamic in genre as it is rigorous in musicianship.

Be sure to look into the band’s live shows:

Tour Dates ::
03.13 Maggie Mae’s Planetary Group SXSW BBQ (Austin, TX)
03.19 Red Devil Lounge (San Francisco, CA)

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