Review
Genre and Mood
Leska made L&H a short piece of electronic pop with a long memory. It sits in indie electronic music, built by two producers rather than a band, but its mood is nostalgic: the duo’s own notes for their debut EP say this is the track haunted by Motown’s ghosts. Groovy rather than flashy, it feels like a soul record remembered rather than replayed.
Song Summary
The title is left unexplained; the music does the talking. L&H runs just over three minutes, pop length, and that economy fits the ambition Leska set out for their first EP: to renew the word pop, stretching its lines and shades. The memory of Motown is the detail that makes it stay with you. The band speaks of ghosts, not of copies: the warmth of that era hangs over a production that is electronic in its flesh, to borrow the band’s phrase.
Musical Breakdown
Intro
In a three-minute song the mood has to arrive early, and here it is the warmth of that older soul music that sets it.
Main Section
The body of the track rides the groove, with the Motown feeling the band describes lying over the rhythm like a colour.
Outro
The track closes at pop length, without a long club ending; the live session is where it gets room to stretch.
Concepts in Focus
L&H exists in an alternate version worth hearing next to this one. Three days before the studio track’s video went up, Nowadays Records posted a live session directed by Sourdoreille, and it runs 5:13 against 3:17. On stage the two producers play all the instruments themselves, guitars, cello and drums, so the comparison shows how much of a song’s mood comes from production and how much from the people playing it.
The groove is what holds a short track like this together. With no long build or drop to rely on, the way the rhythm parts lock together has to carry the nostalgia on its own. Compare how Her – Her, by another Rennes duo of the same years, turns soul into something sparse and electronic.
Artistic Context
Leska are two French producers, Marc Mifune and Thomas Lucas, known as Les Gordon and Douchka. Les Gordon is a trained cellist and self-taught multi-instrumentalist whose EPs appeared on Kitsuné; Douchka started as a DJ, was selected for the 2015 Red Bull Music Academy in Tokyo and signed to Nowadays Records. They met in Rennes, started Leska in 2015 and describe it as a laboratory, a fusion of two sensibilities that leans further toward pop than their solo work. L&H came out as a single on Nowadays Records on 16 February 2017 and became the third of six tracks on the debut EP Circles, released on 15 September 2017.
Impact and Reception
L&H was one of the tracks that introduced Leska before their EP, and Nowadays released it with two videos, the studio track and the live session. It is here for the soul it carries in a small space. Play it twice, then watch the live session.
