The Album Leaf - A Chorus of Storytellers

The Album Leaf is an experiment ambient post-rock group from San Diego, California. Their latest release, A Chorus of Storytellers, is the effort’s first release featuring a full band.

Perro, the first track on the album, fades in with a light static overpowered by a synth using a simple progression and gradually adding more and more body. Behind all of this are some sort of announcements by human voices that are barely audible and seem to be an adult teaching a child to speak or read. The track is otherwise instrumental.
Perro bleeds into Blank Pages adding a drum machine’s beat to the ever evolving synthesizer piece. Slowly throughout the song strings come and go giving way to a very post-rock sounding guitar and bells to compliment the drum machine.
There is a Wind picks up again heavily with the synthesizer but with real drums this time, and harmonized vocals. This song conjures a very dreamlike state, and the lyrics fit the instrumentals perfectly: “There’s a wind behind everyone that takes us through our lives.” After a moment with lyrics, the song breaks into instrumentals and slowly begins to incorporate background, chant like lyrics.
Within Dreams starts off with more drums machine beats and a slowly building chorus of instrumentals that gains momentum and by the middle of the song becomes a progressive ambience of strings, guitar, bass and a beautiful backing synth. This is another fully instrumental track.
Falling from the Sun seems to be a more vocally based song but still incorporates the symphony of instrumentals from previous tracks. Continuing on with the dream sequence that is A Chorus of Storytellers, the song’s lyrics again invoke a very dreamy state with harmonized, repetitive, chanting vocals: “We’ll find a way, yes we’ll find a way, yes we’ll find a way to fall.”
Stand Still is yet another beautiful, ambient, instrumental piece. This type of track is truly the essence of bands that create music like this. The intricate drum beats paired with the eloquent strings is enough but the guitar and backing synthesizer continue to add to the experience.
The end of Stand Still fades into Summer Fog. If the rest of the album is slow and ambient, this piece is certainly one step away from moving backward, not to say it is a bad song in the least. Another instrumental only track, it truly does illustrate a ‘summer fog’ and a lighthouse and steamboat, among other things. Until the Last follows in the wake of Stand Still as yet another awesome instrumental track.
We Are and Almost There revive again the use of lyrics and harmonized chants which compliments what the band is doing perfectly. Tied Knots creeps up with the same static that Perro came in with, creating a musical sandwich. The song takes it very slowly and casts off the album with more elaborate instrumentals than it came in with. Finally the song slowly fades the album out back into the static from whence it came.