Benjamin Francis Leftwich - Last Smoke Before The Snowstorm (Album Review)
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
Written by Rhys Morgan
Now, I could begin this review with a short anecdote of how I once met a pre-fame Benjamin Francis Leftwich. It was at Green Man Festival last year, we shared some pre-festival drinks and discussed his dissapointment with The Flaming Lips, but I won’t bore you. In less than a year since then things have exploded for Leftwich. He’s been championed by Zane Lowe and Greg James on Radio 1 and is currently preparing for summer festivals including Green Man and perhaps most impressively Glastonbury.
Leftwich has been in the process of creating Last Smoke Before The Snowstorm through his adolescence and into young adulthood, now at only 21 he has delivered a debut album far beyond his years. Ten tracks of elegant acoustic beauty backed up by his painfully fragile voice. His lyrics are those of quizzical, naive melancholy while his musicianship is simple yet effective. The only disappointment is the album’s length, at only 31 minutes, its over painfully quickly.
There are scraps of influence everywhere you turn. There are musical similarities to contemporaries such as Message To Bears, Johnny Flynn and The Tallest Man On Earth. As well as atmospheric influences from places as unexpected as Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska on closing track Don’t Go Slow. ‘If you crash a car into your best friend’s house’, is the album’s striking opening line. There are lyrics throughout the record verging on the darker side, but Leftwich’s innocent vocals keep the tone from ever becoming too tenebrous.
It’s the little things that will prove the difference between this and the dozens of other indie folk albums floating around these days. The violin backdrop of Box Of Stones, the hooting backing vocals on 1904 and Stole You Away’s electric riff are just three extra touches of class. There may be people who come along and claim the tracks are all a bit ‘same-y’, my response is this: put a little effort in and actually listen to this album and you’ll get a lot out of it. Each song may have the same fundamental ingredients, but each is as unique as the next.
In the last 12 months Benjamin Francis Leftwich has been thrust into stardom and has managed to run with his new fame. But after the release of last Smoke Before The Snowstorm things are going to step up a gear. Leftwich will soon no longer be touted as a hot prospect of Brit-folk but will see himself standing shoulder to shoulder with Laura Marling, Mumford & Sons and Noah and the Whale as one of its brightest forerunners.
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Leftwich has been in the process of creating Last Smoke Before The Snowstorm through his adolescence and into young adulthood, now at only 21 he has delivered a debut album far beyond his years. Ten tracks of elegant acoustic beauty backed up by his painfully fragile voice. His lyrics are those of quizzical, naive melancholy while his musicianship is simple yet effective. The only disappointment is the album’s length, at only 31 minutes, its over painfully quickly. 
