The Leaf Library: The World Is A Bell
Where It's At Is Where You Are

It wouldn't be fair to call The World Is A Bell a pastiche of Stereolab, Ms. John Soda, and Broadcast; it would be wholly accurate, however, to say that fans of those acts won't regret for a moment adding The Leaf Library release to their collections. Two years in the making, the album's officially the North London band's second, though the number increases if you include remix, side-project, and short-run CDR and tape releases. The group's ambitious follow-up to 2015's Daylight Versions is expansive by design, a recording of broad scope deliberately fashioned to encourage immersion. It's a bold outfit that caps an already full album of songs with a twenty-minute outro, but The Leaf Library is no ordinary band.

Guitarist/lyricist Matt Ashton and singer Kate Gibson formed the group in 2006, which after experiencing the usual share of personnel changes now augments the pair with drummer Lewis Young, bassist Gareth Jones, guitarist Simon Nelson, vocalist Melinda Bronstein, saxophonist Daniel Fordham, and flugelhorn player Laura Copsey. Many supplement their main instruments with synthesizer, guitar, percussion, and/or piano, and fleshing out the sound on the new release are guest contributions by Iskra Strings, vocalists Ed Dowie and Mike Cranny, French hornist Nathan Thomas, pianist Michael Wood, and others.

Stylistically, The World Is A Bell is encompassing, with electronic pop, space rock, and ambient-drone reference points. The band builds its songs into beguiling mini-symphonies enhanced by brass and string arrangements by Fordham, and, imbuing the songs with humanity and warmth, singing by Gibson and Bronstein ensures the material never tips too far into experimentalism or abstraction.

The 7/4 opener “In Doors and Out Through Windows” makes the Stereolab connection clear in weaving a kinetic pulse, intricate vocal polyphony, and vibraphone (by Pete Gofton) into an entrancingly melodic incantation. Summery, blissed-out, and hypnotic are some of the words that come to mind as the piece unfolds, the listener at this early juncture already captivated by the album material. A hint of house swing animates the drive of “Hissing Waves,” which otherwise tickles the ear with jittery electronic textures and lustrous vocalizing. “Bright Seas” pushes the band's sound into Broadcast territory, the singing never sounding more like Trish Keenan's than here (not a bad thing).

As pop-styled as some of the ten songs are, others present different sides of the band. Undergirding the vocal in “Larches Eat Moths,” for example, a thick, droning backdrop appears comprised of bowed strings and loud, foghorn-like reverberations; meanwhile, the instrumental title track's a meditation offering a strings-heavy respite from the vocal-based treatments, whereas the band's jones for experimental dronescaping is captured in “Bodies Carried Off By Bees” when Emily Mary Barnett and Bobby Barry add percussion, objects, and electronics to the track's churning combustion.

Suitably titled, “An Endless” cycles languorously for eleven-plus minutes, The Leaf Library cruising down its own imaginary Autobahn armed with synthesizers and chiming guitars and meditating on mortality and other matters, after which “More Than Half Asleep” presents a two-minute synthesizer lullaby as a prelude to the grandiose epic “Paper Boats On Black Ink Lake.” In its opening minutes, Gibson and Bronstein emote over a lulling, slow-motion drift, the material eventually morphing into a creaking drone of shuddering guitars, guttural saxophone, and slowcore drumming. Speaking of The World Is A Bell, Ashton said, “We wanted to create something that was completely its own thing, that was in no hurry to get anywhere, and that contained large expanses for listeners to get lost in.” Consider said goals soundly achieved. Stereolab, Ms. John Soda, and Broadcast devotees lamenting the cessation of new music from those outfits could do a whole lot worse than look to The Leaf Library for consolation.

January 2020