Leroy Clampitt, formerly known as Big Taste, is a Grammy-nominated New Zealand producer and songwriter based in Los Angeles, California. Having previously co-written and produced songs for artists including Madison Beer, Sabrina Carpenter and Lily Allen, he’s now striking out on his own with his first solo album, Get Happy. Get the album here.
Opening your album with the proclamation ‘I’m going to die’ is pretty daring as a statement of intent. Alas, what starts as a rumination on mortality quickly becomes a love song with Clampitt sweetly intoning “all that I hope is that you’re there with me”. This about-face is disappointing for a professional miserablist such as myself but it’s a jaunty and melodic number nevertheless.
It also serves as a fitting introduction for the rest of the album. This is not challenging music, but rather a collection of (mostly) love songs that will sound good as background music in a trendy bar. I don’t mean that to be as much of a criticism as that sounds. Background music has its place, but this record is not pushing boundaries at all.
‘Your Boy’ and ‘The Brighter Side of Life’ continue the theme of being young and in love, with the former a woozy Tame Impala-esque ballad with a Mac DeMarco guitar solo and the latter a piano-led ballad that edges worryingly close to sounding like musical theatre. You can imagine it soundtracking a montage in a Disney movie, perhaps.
More successful is ‘Ricky Martin’, a wistful, nostalgic ballad that sees Clampitt reminiscing about dancing to Ricky Martin’s ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’ before the song builds to what is the album’s more memorable chorus. And that’s part of the problem here. None of this music is bad (actually that’s not quite true, the title track is bad), and the fact that Clampitt played most of the instruments on the record is admirable, but none of it is particularly memorable. Having said that, Clampitt wrote the album in between other projects in a burst of inspiration, so maybe this is something not meant to last. Again, ephemeral, disposable music has its place in the sonic ecosystem.
‘Sick Day’ is perhaps the most experimental song on the album, built around a hiphop beat and Beck bass loop, and the lyrics to ‘I Used to be a Tire’ are pretty fun but by the time we get to ‘Good Night’, the final track on the album and yet another classic song structure that nods to the past (The Beatles and particularly Paul McCartney’s ‘granny music’, as John Lennon memorably described it, loom large throughout), seems to be sweet and sincere and is pleasant enough without being essential, it is clear that Get Happy will no doubt have its supporters, but there isn’t enough here to fully establish Clampitt as a solo artist in his own right.
Get Happy would be a good record to throw on when the sun is shining and the cocktails are flowing; just don’t expect it to resonate much beyond the here and now.
Comments are closed.