wears the trousers magazine

Leni Ward
Body ••••
Tunica Adventitia

Turning the tables on the critical faculty, Leni Ward has unknowingly set Wears The Trousers a challenge: to appraise her album Body without imposing the shackles of comparison. You see, Ms Ward is keeping a public tally on her website of artists she is likened to. Currently in the lead is…oh wait, I can’t say. That might count. This is going to be tough.

That Body has merits enough to sprint towards the word count without dropping names is something of a relief. Ah, but wait, the first song seems to be about Madonna, the Madonna! No getting around that. “Mary had a baby and doomed the world” must rank up there with the Pope’s least favourite opening salvos, but it’s certainly effective in securing the listener’s attention. But the range of Ward’s barb outstretches faith alone; her question is whether the great women of religion and mythology are great only through their ability to act as progenitors of even greater men – as she rightly points out, it’s not like Mary was given a choice in the matter – and whether a woman who chooses to go against the female’s basic biological purpose is valid in the eyes of others.

Body, then, is a concept album of sorts. Our individual anatomy can be our temple, our obsession, our persecutor, our prison, both enemy and friend in our daily conflict against extinction. Ward’s turbulent relationship with her own mortal form has been going on for a little over 23 years now, many of which were spent struggling to come to terms with a mystery childhood illness. This is most transparently chronicled in ‘Can’t Be, Won’t Be’, an appealing mix of harsh beats, piano and strings both plucked and bowed that phase in and out beneath Ward’s plaintive singing. The disturbing reference to beetles eating her face aside – nightmares were a side effect of the medications she was on – this is Body’s most accessible moment, distilling the album’s imaginative use of the organic and the inorganic into a satisfying standout.

The injustice of our physicality often engenders an externalised rage, and Ward doesn’t shy away from those feelings either. As ‘Mary’ fades she switches archetypes, to the Dark Mother from the Divine, for the oppressive, rumbling ‘Burn’, a clear and present threat to a female adversary. But it’s not all bleak. Even love gets a look in on ‘Blank Space’. Sort of. In a biological way. Leni calls it “the epiphany of blood”, recognising again a lack of choice, this time over who and what we find ourselves attracted to. It’s these internal wrangles that Ward excels at, and ultimately Body’s finest moments come with her claustrophobic analyses of major depression. If ‘Heroism’ seems to be contemplative of suicide (”If I dived into this, I would have said it all”), the emotionally charged ‘These Are My Catechisms’ outright dismisses the notion. Music alone is worth being alive for.

The most impressive of Body’s several impressive facets is that Ward wrote, played and engineered everything herself, showing multi-instrumental prowess even on less common instruments like the array mbira. Given how lushly orchestrated, atmospheric (alright, occasionally downright creepy) and professional sounding the outcome, her talent is not in short supply. A world – if not several galaxies – away from the acoustic demo she sent us in 2005, Body sinks its wind-up teeth into the complexities and the underbelly of what it means to be a woman, to be human, both honoured and doomed to be corporeal.

And as for those pesky comparisons, well, only the naggingly familiar digitally altered a cappella of ‘These Are My Catechisms’ really insists upon it. But I’ll play your game, Leni. Hide and seek is fun.

Alan Pedder
UK release date: 04/08/08

‘My Heart’

‘Can’t Be, Won’t Be’