Ben Leit’s Déjà Vu bubbles with a crisp, energetic buoyancy that gives me the urge to dance in public with my headphones on. It has an introspective feeling, but couples that with an extroverted energy — like the joke that no-one hears but you, leading you to laugh out loud in a room of straight faces.
Leit is a 22-year-old musician, a dabbler with a love for the very notion of variety, learning and experience. Ben began his musical journey from the point his father introduced him to Thelonious Monk, one of my all-time favourites, and the rest is history.
The eclectic taste enjoyed by Ben leads us to the kind of music we have here, on Déjà Vu. It is pop, it is soul, it is polished. And yet what it is not, is varnished. Because, yes, there is a difference: one is a deeper layer of abstraction, and Ben is right here, real and human and on the surface of this music, smoothing.
Déjà Vu is a love song, but it’s also a tribute to the feeling that both life and love tend to be cyclical… It can feel new, even whilst we know we have been here before.