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THE ALBUM LEAF

The Album Leaf

Future Falling

    Jimmy LaValle’s The Album Leaf has spun from solo outlet to full band and back in its nearly 25 years. His acclaimed catalog spans releases for labels such as Sub Pop, City Slang, Relapse, and others. He also composes music for film and television, scoring over 20 projects (narrative features, documentaries, and TV series) since 2009. The cinematic sensibilities of The Album Leaf were present from the beginning. His 1999 debut introduced the start of a signature sound: melodic and meditative electro-organic soundscapes constructed with guitar, percussion, Rhodes, and field recordings.

    His seventh full-length LP, and first since 2016, arrives in 2023 via Vancouver’s Nettwerk Records. FUTURE FALLING finds LaValle working with an array of musicians, shaping slightly darker, more spacious, and synth-driven songs with contributions from Bat For Lashes, Kimbra, and many others. The music registers a shade darker and more synth-driven than most moments in his acclaimed catalog, a bridge between shadowy, cerebral terrain and dreamy precision pop, where softly percussive frameworks meet shimmering sound design and emotive instrumentation.

    LaValle sees the construction of FUTURE FALLING as less conventional than past work. Contributions were done remotely with a “throw everything at it” mindset, making LaValle the arranger of layers from all over: drums, synths, horns, violins, voice, and more. LaValle created a pastiche of these layers and elements; in some cases even moving vocal takes to new tracks entirely. Without the in-the-room dynamics, he had more time to experiment, adding and subtracting ad infinitum. The album opens on “PROLOGUE,” an evocative, slow-building instrumental that rides a pattern into a symphonic sea of static. Keys and horns glide atop the rhythmic pulse of “DUST COLLECTS,” setting the contemplative scene for “AFTERGLOW,” the record’s most pop-minded performance. Here Kimbra, the Grammy-winning New Zealand singer-songwriter, renders a striking recollection of past love as percussive elements shimmer and swirl.

    A plaintive piano line moves throughout “Cycles 19.9” encircled by light ambient washes, both a valley between two peaks and a powerful composition in its own right. “Future Falling” follows; with origins tracing back to 2015, the track embodies the full sonic journey LaValle has taken. All the hallmarks of The Album Leaf — melodic builds, vivid sprawl, tonal shape-shifting — assemble to a blissful finish. For the next stretch, “Cycles” begins with a uneasy Rhodes loop that builds and erupts into a wall of texture paving its way into “Give In,” where LaValle models a movement that begins subtle and measured before curving up with skyward, percussive bursts (“Stride”) and settling back down to the album’s back-half centerpiece, “Near” featuring the acclaimed English artist Natasha Khan aka Bat For Lashes. “Do you feel me near?” she sings into a mist of widescreen synths and soothing, distant drum beats as if searching through the dark.

    TRACK LISTING

    1) Prologue
    2) Dust Collects
    3) Afterglow (featuring Kimbra)
    4) Future Falling
    5) Breathe
    6) Cycles
    7) Give In
    8) Stride
    9) Near (featuring Bat For Lashes)
    10) Epilogue

    The Album Leaf

    Between Waves

    Nearly twenty years into a career that has seen Jimmy LaValle exercising his creativity across the realms of film scoring, sound collage, and electronic / rock music, via instrumental and vocal-driven compositions alike, LaValle and The Album Leaf are poised to deliver yet another sonic triumph with 2016’s Between Waves.

    Born out of a thorough reinvention of LaValle's creative process and approach, Between Waves is The Album Leaf's first proper full-length record in over six years and the first to be recorded and produced as a complete band, and was written with greater emphasis on the group dynamic. The album displays multifaceted, meticulous sound design, a keen ear for balancing disparate influences, and the strongest senses of dynamics, rhythm, and composition The Album Leaf has displayed to date. From the moody evolution of "Glimmering Lights" to the wistful trip-hop stylings of "New Soul" and beyond, Between Waves is a gorgeous collection of euphoric melodies and emotionally charged, multi-instrumental driven soundscapes from the longstanding innovators. This is intelligent, beautifully composed music at its most inventive, most confident, and most impressive.

    STAFF COMMENTS

    Barry says: Well this is different isn't it? Not like 'It doesn't sound like The Album Leaf' different, it definitely does, but with an urgency previously unheard. I'm a big fan of LaValle's mellow Rhodes-based compositions (the recent reissue of 'In A Safe Place' was one of my record-buying highlights of recent times). The Rhodes is still present here fortunately, but it is backed with thumping drums in places, glitchy snares and giant swells, all topped off with silky vocal refrains. Pristinely produced and exciting from beginning to end. Rich and luxurious. Like a Creme Egg, but better for you.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. False Dawn
    2. Glimmering Lights
    3. New Soul
    4. Back To The Start
    5. Wandering Still
    6. Never Far
    7. Lost In The Fog
    8. Between Waves



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