SKYGREEN LEOPARDS - Life & Love in Sparrow’s Meadow

Donaldson and Donovan Quinn (aka mr. Verdure) and the

new-weird America, a "strange" and dreamlike variant of the spare, minimal folk

of the new millennium. Theirs is an aesthetic that turns the simple and the fragile into a

reflected glimpse of pure velvety escape, amid slumbering woods at the edge of

an ideal wonderland. A pastoral, idyllic vein holds these songs as if in a dream,

songs with the lightness of a caress, the purity of a

gust of wind, but which, within this mythology of enchantment, end up losing themselves

in daydreams of oneiric, parallel worlds. Too oneiric, too parallel. At

best, an impromptu game, an arcadian retreat into the folds of the flimsiest sounds and

melodies ("Mother, The Sun Makes Me Cry"), where the folk takes on

sylvan features ("Belle Of The Woodsman's Autumn Hall"), playing with

fairy-tale settings ("Egyptian Rosemarie"), in which the voices camouflage themselves one

behind the other, timid.

Frail, pop-edelic little bodies ("Clouds

Through Sparrows Eyes") walk backwards towards Albion's soft-pop dream.

Natural traits that collide with the acoustic, autistic dynamics of the

instruments (guitars, drums, mandolin, dulcimer, banjo, bouzouki), sketching

watercolors that are all too evanescent, sealed within their own perimeter of

cut-rate freak spirituality. Lines of sound grind themselves smooth, violins

that fade away swallowed by the affable stumbling of a banjo (“Tents Along The

Water”). A bland sweetness, playing blind man's buff with the originals of

John’s Children or Simon &

Garfunkel, believing itself original (“Come Down Off Your Mountain,

Moses”).

In between sits the mini-suite (take a breath…) “Careless Gardeners

(Of Eden)/ Sparrows Of Eden (Eden Fading)/ Drunken Gardeners Dance (Paradise

Lost Sweetly)”, where the carousel of flutes, guitars, percussion and assorted

twittering shows a love for detail and also reveals a decent

ability to sketch out, again and again, a timeless scenario, suspended in the

void where it is destined to lose itself. And if boredom hasn't

already delivered the final blow by this point, know that nothing particularly interesting

you'll find nothing in what remains: "Minotaur (Burn A Candle For Love)" – organ

circular and falsettos – "Labyrinth Windows" and "A Child Adrift" seal the deal on

an album so intimate it actually becomes irritating.

Man

you've been warned…

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

30/04/2026