But the track, a nine-minute funereal masterpiece, follows hot on the heels of the discordant opener 'The Arrow of Time, which sets a tone that goes beyond sadness and into the sinister and introspective environs of dark ambient. 'This Is The Story Of Paradise Lost' tugs remorselessly at the heart-strings, drifting as it does on a sea of piano notes that would have gladly been seized upon by Mahler or Satie. In lesser hands, such a deliberately overwrought approach would (and has) quickly become maudlin. As I wrote in a review of Ezekiel Honig's Folding In On Itself, beauty can be as damaging as it is rapturous, and Leyland Kirby has made the bold decision to hone in on this uneasy, yet gorgeous, balance.

But under the Leyland Kirby moniker, he thrusts aside the context to focus on heartbreaking melodies, and the unadulterated, troubling effect they can have on the psyche.

His phenomenal work as The Caretaker is an emotionally charged exploration of the disintegration of memory, using scratched vinyl as a representation of the blurred lines in the reminiscences of Alzheimer's sufferers, and indeed of anyone clutching at the dissolving straws of incoherent thought. Leyland Kirby is someone who has tapped into that place where melancholia is all-enveloping and overwhelming, channeled it, and delivered it unto his audience with an almost bloody-minded determination to not flinch in the face of such palpable emotion. You only have to watch the films of Wong Kar-Wai, Walter Salles, Sofia Coppola, Francois Ozon or Hou Hsiao-Hsien, which often feature prominent soundtracks, to know that the beautiful weight of melancholia - perhaps the most inchoate of emotions, linked to grief, memory, wistfulness, sadness, joy and other more tangible emotions - is almost essential in the expression of humanity on a purely emotional level. I assume that for others this space could perhaps be a tidy suburban street, or a dusty country lane, or an isolated mountain lake.

And this mental space (which is only tangentially linked to actual physical locations) is somewhere my mind instantly flits to in response to certain music. Generally this is London: as everything closes early here, you can quickly find yourself staring at empty offices, pubs, museums, churches and theatres illuminated by unnecessary lights long after most people have deserted the streets in favour of cosy living rooms or windowless clubs. A sort of internal realm of melancholia and wistfulness, if you will.įor me, it's the top floor of some unidentified tower, looking out over an anonymous city in the dead of night. Without wanting to delve too deep into the realms of emotion, there seems to be a place that most, if not all, people can go to - in their heads, naturally - where the confluence of memory and imagination isolates them in a strange mixture of safety and loneliness.

I want to dead kirby