For nearly 30 years, the Album Leaf has made instrumental music that seemed to exist somewhere beyond songwriting. Jimmy LaValle’s new album, A Body of Voices, changes that, bringing a succession of guest singers into his ambient electronics. The result is a surprisingly convincing pop record, but its real achievement is how the voices seem to discover lyrical equivalents for LaValle’s abstract musical language.
LaValle has traditionally been associated with meditative, electro-organic instrumentals, often distinguished by the warm sound of the Fender Rhodes. Here, that familiar sound is less prominent, replaced by a broader palette of synthesizers, keyboards and live drums. Each song features a different collaborator, taking the album through alternative rock, dream pop, electronic pop and R&B.
It begins with “Floating”, an instrumental that initially suggests business as usual. Gently cascading synthesizers drift over fretless bass and a soft, woody clave, creating the sort of calm, carefully paced atmosphere that might have appeared on an earlier Album Leaf record. Only in retrospect does its function become clear: “Floating” establishes the space into which the album’s many voices will enter.
In “Take Me”, featuring Raphaelle Standell-Preston, the album comes alive almost instantly. Its keyboards and live drums create an organic rock sound despite the complete absence of guitars. The track builds gradually, shifting its tonal centre to provide the kind of harmonic release more commonly associated with a rock band. While Standell-Preston’s vocals remain relatively fixed melodically, the music changes underneath her, making the arrangement itself responsible for much of the song’s drama.
Her alluringly pixieish voice seems to play call-and-response with itself, recalling the vocal interplay of the actual Pixies while sounding as though she is delighting in the possibilities of her own voice. As the song builds, splashing cymbals summon Radiohead before cascading synthesizers provide one final, Pink Floydian flourish. It is my favourite track on the record, largely because it demonstrates how to produce the physical release of a rock song without relying on the conventional ingredients of rock.
“Turns”, featuring the weary, breathy vocals of Nicole Miglis, is where the collaboration becomes almost uncanny. Its lyrics circle around themes of “back and forth”, “breaking this cycle” and “taking turns”, while the downtempo music itself seems caught in the same cycle. The lyrics don’t simply sit on top of the ambient arrangement; they find words for its abstract movements.
“True Love, Don’t Be Afraid” is brighter and more dance-oriented, with Stephen McBean’s voice adding warmth to lyrics about love that “bends around the world” and “wraps around the curves”. Those images seem almost tailor-made for LaValle’s music: the song’s pulsing electronic textures curve and flow rather than moving in straight lines, giving McBean’s affectionate metaphors a physical shape.
Maiah Manser’s “Falling” goes further in the opposite direction. Her chants of “I’m falling” and “she’s calling” suggest movement, but the music beneath is strikingly static: minimal instrumentation, little harmonic variation and almost no conventional sense of progression. The tension is beautiful.
“A Known Tomorrow”, featuring Aelatan, is particularly interesting from a production standpoint. A frenetic drum performance is almost submerged beneath pulsing synthesizers and vocals. The result is slightly uncanny: the drummer is playing with enough energy to sound unmistakably physical, yet the production pushes the cymbals so far back that they begin to resemble the tones of a programmed drum machine.
That tension between electronic and organic sound runs through A Body of Voices. It is increasingly difficult to know whether a drum part is genuinely live when modern production can reproduce the swing and dynamics of human performance so convincingly. LaValle nevertheless seems drawn to the texture of live playing, even when he chooses to obscure it.
The album’s many collaborators could easily have made it feel scattered. Instead, LaValle gives them a consistent musical space. The individual songs vary in pace and genre, but the underlying approach remains recognizably Album Leaf: careful textures, gradual movement, understated electronics and an unusual sensitivity to space.
The result is a pop record that doesn’t require the Album Leaf to stop being the Album Leaf. “Floating” may initially sound like an invitation back into LaValle’s familiar instrumental world, but the rest of A Body of Voices keeps opening that world up to other people. The voices bring words, personalities and specific emotional situations into music that was previously content to remain suggestive.
Across A Body of Voices, each vocalist seems to meet LaValle halfway. He gives them spacious, open-ended environments; they respond with lyrics whose themes of movement, cycles and emotional uncertainty seem to belong there. The remarkable thing isn’t that the Album Leaf has learned to make pop music. It is that, after 25 years of instrumental music, he has found singers who understand how to speak its language.