Rodrigo Leão & Scott Matthew

Life Is Long

GLITTERHOUSE. CD/DL/LP A masterclass in sad baroque from Portuguese-Australian alliance. Beth Gibbons, Neil Hannon and Stuart Staples have all turned out for Lisbon’s chamber-pop maestro, so Leão clearly grooves to emotive, quavering voices to reinforce his brooding orchestrations. Having collaborated on Terrible Dawn (included here) with Queenslander Matthew, they’ve now gone the whole hog, Leão opting for a slowly unfurling ’60s-soundtrack brand of melancholia, the drums sitting right back beneath verdant strings, and Matthew’s aching baritone. The duo’s homelands may be sun-drenched but Life Is Long walks in shadow; Unnatural Disaster apart, it’s not austere and Stygian enough to recall that other Scott, Walker, but it’s in the same ballpark, the aural version of falling autumn leaves around the existential wanderer muttering “so toll the bell for those who fell…” (The Fallen). This utterly seductive drama resembles Scandinavian noir, mirrored by the artwork’s bare landscapes of stone, grass, waves and sand: life stripped to its core.