Whether the Bay Area remains a bastion of creative music as the cost of living skyrockets isn’t linked to the success of the new Skygreen Leopards album. But the folksy duo’s first release in about five years, Family Crimes, is emblematic in one way of NorCal’s shifting economic landscape.
Glenn Donaldson, who founded the Bay’s Jewelled Antler Collective, and Donovan Quinn, one-half of New Bums, started this Skygreen Leopards racket around the turn of millennium. And alongside the techie surge over the last decade and change, the pair’s music hasn’t drastically changed, but it has become more meticulously performed, almost mirroring the influx of motherboards and UX coders.
Hooking up with the Woodsist imprint for Family Crimes makes a bit of good sense, seeing as Donaldson has contributed to the label’s flagship ensemble, Woods, in the past. Even if that weren’t the case, Skygreen Leopards’ measured evolution has taken it from the acoustic-based foppery represented on 2001’s I Dreamt She Rode on a Pink Gazelle & Other Dreams to a slightly more exacting, rockier sound on Family Crimes. And now, the vocal harmonies aren’t painful to listen to either. Bonus.
Family Crimes also offers up some of Skygreen Leopards’ faster-paced compositions, “Crying Green & Purple” being particularly jaunty. That title almost references “Yellow is the Color of Bees,” off the Leopards’ 2001 debut. A bit of what sounds like gamelan percussion pushes this new track forward, as both offer a refried vision of country-rock, the older effort simply rendered in less precise performances. There’s not a wealth of difference between the two, just a decade and change of maturing musicality and watching how the Bay has dealt with its own development politically and economically.
If Skygreen Leopards still sounds like its surrounding environs—and it does, kinda—the group works to summon a Bay from times past, rather than portraying its current digitized state. No significant tension sprouts from this new clutch of songs crafted amid the changing city, but ignoring the errant professionalism is just difficult to do. Digitization hasn’t stamped itself on the album, it’s just social context. But that setting allows the Leopards to blithely stroll toward pastoral sounds, coming off like an ensemble that enjoyed significantly cheaper rents and didn’t have to contend with Google busing its employees down to the South Bay a few years back.