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However, as the album progresses, with its mix of violins, guitar, synths and fitful percussion, a paradoxical mood and feel is established – desolate yet comforting, glacial yet warm, remote yet intimate, never more so than on Summer Fog.
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Although Storytellers' qualities imbue it with sufficient class to shine forth from the background (in much the same way as Air's Virgin Suicides score, perhaps), its gentility and decorum are so consistent that this is an LP that needs to be sought out.
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UncutThe band's plush indietronica is still in place, but there's greater warmth and imagination, and real consistency. [Mar 2010, p.79]
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Alternative PressWhile storytellers has a decent amount of vocals, it's still the gorgeous, lush melodies and layered soundscapes that speak the loudest. [Mar 2010, p.90]
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Traces of other San Diego bands like Pinback and LaValle's own Tristeza and the Black Heart Procession are distinctly here, culminating in mellow harmonies, relaxed bass lines and subtle ambient effects.
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In comparison with the current post-rock landscape, it's largely uninteresting, but in creating a palatable easy-listening experience, it's a definite success. Like its predecessors, though, this is one story that's probably best told at bedtime.
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The new ambition found on "A Chorus of Storytellers" has led the Album Leaf to its best execution yet.
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The Sun seems to have come out over The Album Leaf’s glacial landscape with some songs here edging towards a kind of elegant, and very pretty, pop.
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In this way, A Chorus of Storytellers resembles the Flaming Lips’ Embryonic (2009) in that it’s a characteristic and maybe even obvious album that stuffs a band’s commercial instincts under a protective layer of feints and refusals
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While the decidedly middle-of-the-road mood of A Chorus of Storytellers won’t get anyone fired up, though, the way that mood is constructed is the album’s primary appeal.
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The few songs sporting LaValle’s breathy vocals are a plus, and the percussion is heavier this time around, which is a welcome change from his previous predilection for glitch.
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Sure, most of Chorus is pretty, but it's only that: Between the glistening guitars, cymbal washes, sighing strings, and electric piano, the beauty LaValle conjures is effortless but ultimately less impressive for not having any sort of contrast.
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A Chorus Of Storytellers fits in quite succinctly alongside its predecessors, and while perhaps not scaling the skyscraping heights of An Orchestrated Rise To Fall or In A Safe Place, doesn't rally represent a decline in standards either.
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All in all, A Chorus of Storytellers makes for better background music than a main attraction.
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However many crystalline moments of beauty their records contain (and of course there are some to be found here), for me there remains a cloying sense of the overtly melodramatic, of uninventive repetition that it is hard to ignore.
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Q MagazineImpressive though it is, however, there's a lurking feeling that it could have been released any time in the past 10 years. [Mar 2010, p.97]
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Under The RadarA Chorus of Storytellers is an evocative, full-bodied record from a band nearing the peak of their powers. [Winter 2010, p.68]
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Admirable attempts are made to emulate tourmates Lymbyc Systym on Blank Pages, but they fall short of that band’s visceral energy and edge.
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LaValle’s been trading in spitshined tonal conventions and vacuum-sealed beauty for quite some time now, and this might well be his best effort at putting it to record. But there are already three Album Leaf LPs that do this exact same thing, and the prospect of him doing that thing slightly better simply fails to excite.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 4 out of 4
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Mixed: 0 out of 4
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Negative: 0 out of 4
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MikeFeb 3, 2010