British couple Farrah- and Richard West are driven  League Of Lights. The Indie/Pop-Rock duo this year released their third full length album “Dreamers Don’t Come Down”. It’s a top notch production characterized by low, resonating bass lines, elevating choruses, delicate piano arrangements and sensual, female vocals. This band released a refreshing Pop album featuring a few great songs. Richard West answered a few questions to give us more info about this great work.   

(Courtesy by Inferno Sound Diaries)

Q: How did you set up League Of Lights and what makes the artistic chemistry between the both of you?

Richard: We started making music together as soon as we became a couple over twenty years ago. For the first few years we were a Pop-Rock duo working under the name of FARRAH WEST. We recorded quite a few demos, but nothing ever came of them so we decided to form a band and do something a bit heavier. The result was our debut “League Of Lights”-album in 2011 featuring guitarist Ruud Jolie (Within Temptation), drummer Mark Zonder (Fates Warning) and bassist Jerry Meehan (Roxy Music).

It was quite a departure from the music we’d been making up until then, so over our next two albums we naturally found ourselves leaning more towards being a duo again and reverting to our Pop-Rock sound. We still use a full band for live shows, but in the studio it’s mostly just Farrah and me. We both have very different musical backgrounds, but we found a sound where we meet in the middle, a sort of retro-futuristic art Pop-Rock sound with a strong focus on piano and vocals.

Q: Your new album “Dreamers Don’t Come Down” has been partly written and recorded during Covid-19 and the lockdown so what has been the influence and impact on the different aspects of the production?

Richard: During that first Covid-19 lockdown we were pretty much confined to our house, so it was the perfect opportunity to record a third album. We were supposed to be promoting our second one “In The In Between” at the time, but as nobody was allowed to go to any live shows we had to abandon those plans. We made the “Dreamers Don’t Come Down”-album very quickly by our standards, we started in March 2020 and had the whole thing written, recorded and mixed by August 2020. As a result it felt a lot more focussed than “In The In Between”, which took almost five years to make.

Q:  I read you wanted this album more ‘piano-driven’ and with less synths than previous productions. Where does this evolution come from and what does it say about previous releases, self-criticism and perfectionism?

Richard: I think it was partly a reaction to the broader palette of our second album “In The In Between”. The early songs we wrote for that record were heavier and more guitar-driven, but as time went on our writing morphed towards something softer and more keyboard-focussed as we moved slowly back towards our original pop-rock sound. As a result, “In The In Between” was a more eclectic record, more of a five-year anthology than a traditional album.

So for “Dreamers Don’t Come Down” we wanted to re-invent ourselves, focusing on the core of what we are, which is piano and vocal, and build our new sound from the ground up. There are still lots of guitars and synths in there, but in a more modern and minimalist way. We love our previous releases, but we don’t want to keep making the same album.

Q: It seems that during the writing of the album the songs were just flowing. Does it mean you didn’t face major problems and eventually challenges or aspects you weren’t satisfied about? And are there some aspects of the global production you would change today?

Richard: The flow was wonderful, every three weeks we had a new song written, recorded, produced and mixed. There was just one song we didn’t use, a track called “Me And My Memories”, which just felt a little different to the others so we left it out. We still love it so we’ll probably release it as a bonus track or a B-side one day, but it just wasn’t right for the album. But we didn’t face any major problems, we found our sound right from the first mix, which was “Modern Living” back in March 2020, and that established our sound and production ethos for the whole record.

Q: The lyrical content seems to be very important. It feels like a kind of observation and critical perception, sometimes with metaphors about life and reality, but still featuring melancholia. What did you try to express and how personal are the lyrics?

Richard: We wanted the whole album to have a consistent feeling. Farrah’s been quoted as saying that it’s about the past, the present and the future; about taking the best from all that you have been through, the pressures of modern life and keeping your dreams alive in dark times. So that includes melancholy alongside hope; sadness and frustration alongside happiness and optimism. I suspect it probably captures what a lot of us are going through at the moment.

Q: Several singles and videos have been already released. That’s an interesting item because I hear several label owners affirming singles are the future, people no longer listening to albums, preferring streaming platforms to make their own playlists. What do you think about it and how do you expect things evolving? 

Richard: It felt like one of those albums where we could have released most of the songs as singles. I’ve grown up compiling mix tapes, compilation CDs and playlists to listen to when I’m out and about. I still love to do that so I totally understand the appeal, and hopefully our songs will end up on plenty of people’s playlists too. But ultimately “Dreamers Don’t Come Down” was made to be a complete album, so I hope people will listen to it that way. Not to mention it sounds absolutely gorgeous on vinyl!

Inferno Sound Diaries

I have been working for over 30 years with Side-line as the main reviewer. My taste is eclectic, uncoventional and I prefer to look for the pearls, even if the bands are completely unknown, thus staying loyal to the Side-Line philosophy of nurturing new talents.

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Genre/Influences: Indie-Pop, Electro-Pop.

Format: Digital, CD, Vinyl.

Background/Info: This is the third full length album for the duo Farrah- and Richard West. The British duo composed this work during the lockdown in 2020.

Content: The opening song (still released as single) “Modern Living” reveals a vibrating, deep resonating bass line with some fine Electro-Pop on top and the sensual vocals of Farrah West. The song doesn’t necessarily fully represent the rest of the work, but the Electro/Indie-Pop approach definitely remains the main basis of the work. I sometimes get the sensation of discovering a more poppy format of Placebo. Some of the choruses have a true elevating effect. The songs have been accomplished with delicate piano arrangements. Most of the songs have a sweet taste of melancholia mixed with pure emotional vocals. This album sounds sweet, but also revealing a few club-friendly pieces.

+ + + : I honestly can’t remember to have heard of League Of Lights, but the opening song “Modern Living’ directly caught my attention. This song is simply brilliant for the deep, sensual bass line merged with the captivating and hot vocals of the singer and the elevating effect of the chorus. “Ghosts” and “Persephone” both have a similar impact. But the album is mainly featuring softer and sweeter songs, but here again “Dreamers Don’t Come Down” has a few nice surprises; beautiful songs with delicate sound treatments. I especially recommend listening to “The Collector”. I also want to salute the great and informative booklet of this digipak. League Of Lights this way reveals to have an eye for every single detail; a great production sold in an artistic digipak.

– – – : I was less convinced by a few ‘softer’ songs although they also have something sensitive and delicate.

Conclusion: League Of Lights took me by surprise unleashing a refreshing work with a few outstanding songs.

Best songs: “Modern Living”, “The Collector”, “Persephone”, “Ghosts”.

Rate: (8).

Artist: https://leagueoflights.com / www.facebook.com/leagueoflightsofficial Read the news on ‘Dreamers Don’t Come Down’.

About League Of Lights

League Of Lights is the British duo of Farrah West and Richard West, a couple who began making music together over twenty years ago under the name Farrah West before forming League Of Lights. Their 2011 debut album, released under the band name, featured guitarist Ruud Jolie (Within Temptation), drummer Mark Zonder (Fates Warning) and bassist Jerry Meehan (Roxy Music). The duo then settled back into a piano-and-vocal-driven Pop-Rock sound across their second album, “In The In Between”, which took nearly five years to complete, and the follow-up “Dreamers Don’t Come Down”, written, recorded and mixed between March and August 2020 during the first Covid-19 lockdown. In a Click Interview with Side-Line, Richard West described the album as a deliberate return to “the core of what we are, which is piano and vocal”.

Inferno Sound Diaries

I have been working for over 30 years with Side-line as the main reviewer. My taste is eclectic, uncoventional and I prefer to look for the pearls, even if the bands are completely unknown, thus staying loyal to the Side-Line philosophy of nurturing new talents.

www.side-line.com

Out now is a brand new single and video from the female fronted act League Of Lights (Farrah and Richard West), a radio edit of “Persephone”. The full length version of the track is included on “Dreamers don’t come down”, the band’s newest album out on LP, CD and download. “Dreamers don’t come down” is the duo’s third album to date and draws influences from early ’80s synth pioneers like John Foxx, as well as ’00s exponents of the genre such as Ladytron.

Farrah explains the genesis of the song’s lyrics: “(It) came about during the first lockdown in March 2020 when I was thinking about the awful dark shadow that was about to envelop the UK and felt sadness for the families who were losing loved ones and not able to be present. I am aware of people who, facing death but living to tell the tale, have spoken of it as an actual person willing them on their final journey. I wanted to tell the story of the shadow looming, but to seek out and focus on the light rather than the darkness. We were thinking about how to talk about death without using the actual word and settled on Persephone, who was the unwilling wife of Hades and the queen of the underworld in Greek Mythology. It seemed a slightly more poetic way of singing about the topic.”

She continues: “Rich had a piece of music that seemed a bit too jolly for such a serious set of lyrics, but actually turned out to be perfect and stopped the whole song sounding morbid. I call it the jaunty song about death but it has this amazing energy to it and I really can’t wait to play it live.”

You can view the video for “Persephone” right below, it was made by North Macedonian film director Peter Zdravkovski.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

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League Of Lights are an electronic pop-rock duo comprised of Farrah and Richard West. Their third album to date, “Dreamers Don’t Come Down” will be released later next month. Out now is the new single “Modern Living” which is promoted with an anime video.

You can view the video below.

Describing their modus operandi for the new album, Richard explains that “we wanted it to be more piano-driven than our previous release and deliberately utilised a smaller pallet of sounds. We had just recorded the song ‘Modern Living’ and that helped to define how our new material would sound – more open than before with less synths and more space for Farrah’s voice to really lift off. It’s as much about the space as it is about the notes.”

The majority of the album was written and recorded during the 2020 spring/summer lockdown, with Farrah stating that “it is about the past, the present and the future; about taking the best from all that you have been through, the pressures of modern life and keeping your dreams alive in dark times.” Read the review of ‘Dreamers Don’t Come Down’.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

side-line.com