The press-sheet finds Yorkston and his people needlessly repelling the listener’s natural tendency to categorise his music, which is, for want of a better word, an intimate menagerie of old fashioned folk, hushed Northern irony and delicate acoustic strumming, curled up and woozy in the warm, trusty bosom of violins, clarinets, concertinas and drum brushes and sparse yet cosy arrangements. In all honesty, it’s a bit like finding yourself marooned in a fish-boat off Skye with a crate of rum, a lardy chicken-roast and a companion called Angus. It’s that real. It’s that private. It’s that focused. ‘Woozy With Cider’ is a case in point; Yorkston blearily brushing away the cobwebs of yesterday’s wedding amongst a city of strangers, confused about love and life, sitting before the picture of a dead monkey on the front of a magazine, hung-up and hung-over in a pleasant hotel environment longing for “a village the size of a tea-cup”. It’s the end of a long day with a “beach evening ending”, and like every self-deprecating miserablist, he’s amusing himself with reflections of his own inconsequence and the insufferable vacancy of the average town dweller. In the town’s “cocaine field of electronic cabarets”, Yorkston is by his own admission “the man at the bar drinking over-priced whisky from a barmaid who’s too good to catch his eye”, not taking anything too seriously, but taking it in so smoothly and so sweetly that his gently cantankerous musings provide the breeze upon the rest of the album floats.
Produced by former Talk Talk member Paul Webb with trusty side-kicks ‘The Athletes’ on accordion, lap-steel, fiddle and double-bass, ‘The Year Of The Leopard’ is the sound of a thousand acres of sky, of desultory walks along the beach, idle rambles amongst the glens, late-night conversations and journeys alongside the ghostly vagaries of the Scot’s own misfortunes. It’s romantic, it’s amusing and it basks in the same sun-at-midnight glory as Beck’s ‘Sea Change’ album; sharing its warm, its approachable melodies, its meditativeness and its slurring disregard for licensing-hours.
One of the best albums of the year and quite, quite lovely.