Hating on Pitchfork has become a national pastime among a certain breed of music fan. But, even if you despise the site, the popular internet publication has done at least one beneficent thing for music: It brought to many people’s attention the name Dominique Leone, who wrote reviews for Pitchfork from 2001 to 2007.
Now focused on music full-time, the San Francisco–based singer/songwriter/producer has created two solo albums—2008’s Dominique Leone and 2009’s Abstract Expression—that propel prog rock into the 21st century with dozens of flying, garish colors. These works reveal a predilection for glorious instrumental excess and surprising, sophisticated arrangements. Strains of Todd Rundgren, King Crimson, early Queen, Magma, Italian operatic subversives Pierrot Lunaire, and even Shudder to Think surface, but not in obvious ways. Trained in the trumpet from junior high through college, Leone also plays keyboards and sings in expressively pliable tones that soar somewhere between Greg Lake and Adrian Belew.
While Leone’s songs are serpentine and ornate, they exude a rare kind of harmonic beauty that suggests all those years of advanced musical study haven’t been squandered. But his melodies aren’t so abstruse that they don’t worm their way into your brain and bomb it with endorphins. Leone essentially considers himself a pop artist, which is akin to van Gogh labeling himself a cartoonist, but there’s a grain of truth to his claim.
While he doesn’t agree with the Rundgren comparison, Leone says he loves “Magma, and grew up on Queen and King Crimson, so those are all big influences for me; also Beatles and Beach Boys. I don’t really think of what I do as ‘prog,’ necessarily. I guess it is proggy, if you say it’s a bunch of tricky stuff happening all the time with high voices and key modulations and things… but, really, I think of myself as a songwriter, just writing chord progressions and melodies that weave together narratives and emotions in mostly small blocks. The kind of people I worship are Randy Newman, Paul McCartney, Judee Sill, Andy Partridge, Brian Wilson. They’re just ridiculously weird, creative pop songwriters, with no fear about letting a song go wherever it will.”
If what Leone does is pop, it’s extremely baroque and multilayered, seemingly the work of a perfectionist lost in his own hermetic, richly textured soundworld.
“I don’t know how much of a perfectionist I am,” Leone counters, “but I’m definitely your typical one-guy-in-a-studio type. I usually start songs on the piano/keyboard and play with them long enough until I can hear ideas I like, want to develop. I think mostly in terms of harmony and rhythm. After that, I take it to the sequencer or laptop and start to arrange/produce it. If I have lyrics already, I’ll start doing vocals. If I don’t, I keep on building the track, eq’ing, FXing, etc. I have been accused of having too-busy tracks, so perhaps there’s an argument for having lyrics beforehand.”
Oddly for such an articulate individual, Leone declares himself more of a “music guy” than a “lyrics guy.” With Pitchfork, he championed obscure, challenging musicians such as Bob Drake, Koenjihyakkei, and This Heat. Familiar with the grind of being a critic, I ask Leone if being hyperaware of past and present music has pushed him to be more distinctive in his own compositions.
“Man, writing about music is a totally different perspective from making it,” he says. “I really did (and do) want to get the word out about bands that I thought had less than [their] deserved space in music magazines/sites, whose critical reps I thought needed ‘straightening out.’
“But the thing about writing about music is (a) you really do have to be on top of a lot of music all the time, and (b) there’s an implied duty to be at least somewhat objective, to stand back a little from the music and discuss not only how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ it does whatever it does, but how much value/meaning you think it has in a broader cultural perspective. After a while, I started to feel further away from music than I wanted to, so I stopped writing.”
With connections to the Norwegian cosmic-disco scene (he’s worked with Lindstrøm and Mungolian Jetset) and the U.S. psychedelic underground (a collab with Vas Deferens Organization member/Ariel Pink accomplice Eric Lumbleau is imminent), Leone shows vast range and impeccable aesthetics. For this tour, he’s enlisted percussionist Jordan Glenn (Fred Frith, tUnE-YarDs), guitarist Ava Mendoza (Nels Cline, Carla Bozulich), and bass clarinetist Aaron Novik. They’ll be focusing on the Summer EP, some new material, and Abstract Expression, which Pitchfork gave a measly 6.7. It should’ve garnered Best New Music honors, but Leone is not going to grieve over this injustice.
“In a weird way, having written about music makes me a little insensitive to criticism of myself,” he admits. “If I see something that I think isn’t accurate or misses the point, I feel like I kind of know where the person is coming from—even if it’s really far from me.” 
