Artist : Supreme Beings of Leisure
Album : Supreme Beings of Leisure
Label : Palm Pictures

Take every James Bond movie you’ve ever seen. Now the best theme song from each five year period, apply them to a logical progression and extrapolate the sound that would naturally result from this around about, say, 2008. This is the Supreme Beings of Leisure.

As anyone who knows me knows, and anyone who reads these reviews is probably learning, I don’t understand modern musical classifications. I try and I try. I’ve read guides, spoken to friends about it, everything, but it just doesn’t sink in. However, there are times when you just know, in your gut, that you have it right. When, in my younger years, I first heard ‘Bauhaus’, it was described to me as ‘gothic’ (a term I hadn’t, in my ignorance, heard applied as a musical genre. ) But it was right. You could tell, just by hearing the word and hearing the music, that this was the correct definition. "Yes," I said, "Bauhaus is gothic!" The same is true for Supreme Beings of Leisure. Someone said ‘trip-hop’, and I responded with a resounding, "That is RIGHT!!! It is TRIP-HOP!" It seems that these words accurately describe the intense but startlingly smooth sounds of Supreme Beings of Leisure.

And that’s what it is. It’s smooth. It’s smooth like Oban’s is smooth. It’s smooth like Face is smooth. Every track from the album creates this sense that you should either be chilling in a dark lounge filled with black lights and undulating color or idling up to some shadowy figure who’s going to turn out to be a Israeli intelligence operative that thinks you’re fucking HOT. You either want to be some rock solid Shaft-like hero of the modern age or you want to be tripping on X, lying back on a leather beanbag, sipping bourbon, watching the disco ball bounce lights off the ceiling and dreaming about being a rock solid, Shaft-like hero of the modern age.

Four people make up Supreme Beings, Rick Torres, Kiran Shahani, Ramin Sakurai, and Geri Sori ano-Lightwood, and while I’m sure they all contribute in an important way to the sound, it really boils down, for me, to Geri. Now, I hate it when a fine band is lost in the glamour dumped on their lead singer (like the Sugarcubes. Perfect example. Excellent band forced unfairly to live in the shadow of Bjork.), and that’s not what I’m trying to do here, but her voice really, REALLY makes the music. No other voice would do, kind of like Mark Sandman to Morphine. No, he wasn’t the band, but the music relied on his sound and without it, the band can’t be the same. It’s that certain deep, sultry sexiness that, once the sound is created, sort of locks it into place.

To their credit, the sound that supports the voice is ideal, a smooth, full kind of mixing that really jumps the track of the typical march like rhythm of so much electronic music these days. Add to that the beauty of a lyrical style that matches the mood exactly, sticking to traditional themes of romance and lust, but often hovering around metaphors that play on the very qualities the music promotes, the smooth operator, the mysterious spy, the plotting lover. The sound designs a perfect atmosphere that you are doing yourself a serious favor to indulge in.