The Album Leaf - Forward/Return

By: Joel Frieders

It's never easy to put the blame on yourself for something you assumed was unintentional. You might settle for it just happening outside of your reach, but when you don't quickly correct whatever you knew had happened, you're as much to blame for it continuing as for it happening in the first place.

While I won't go into specifics, the idea of an innocent bystander is a crock of shit when we're talking about the goings on of the human psyche. You felt it, you didn't fix it, shit's on you bro bro.

As vague as all this might sound, you can probably glean from the above text that I'm pissed at myself. I let a frustration with the music industry on the whole turn me off from music in general for over two weeks. I let the 569 emails I get a day from PR companies taint the fact that I love music more than masturbating, and I fucking love that shit. I let the vague passive aggressive Facebook posts from one of the 3,000 bands I like on FB piss me off so much that I hid every single band I saw as glib, smug or self important. I let the constant hum of friends of mine who aren't as fiendish about new and different music as I am force me into complacence and I spent two weeks stuck on AM radio and Blind Melon albums.

Music took a backseat these past few weeks, but nothing sat shotgun.

Then a band name caught my eye through the 400 or so messages flagged <pr> in my gmail, and I recognized it as the one band I relied on in 2010 to help lower my stress levels when the twins were first born. The Album Leaf had this deliberately distant and introspective shit going on that was 80% instrumental electronic, but the organic feel of their arrangements injected me with calm versus making me want to invest in any MDMA.

The Album Leaf have an EP coming out soon titled Forward/Return, and here it was sitting in my inbox shaking its tits at me, daring me to listen to something again. This was essentially the flash of titties I needed to open up iTunes again.

Here, again, The Album Leaf lay out a calmly peaceful and thought provoking smattering of tuneage that brings together the stare off into space with the concentrate intently, and it's fucking gorgeous.

Gorgeous enough that I listened to it twice through without thinking about anything in particular, but I soon realized that I've been a toolbox for assuming that music was what was bothering me. Music wasn't bothering me, I was just busy as shit with life shit and as other scorpios might know, the potential for a shitty attitude is as prevalent in our day to day as our ability to reference masturbation.

The Album Leaf made me realize that I love music again, and they did it slowly, patiently, and with such gentle stroking I'm surprised I didn't think to use their previous works as a figurative fish hook to yank my head out of my fucking ass.

Now I realize this isn't much of an album review, but music isn't always about how you can describe how it sounds as about how it makes you realize shit you somehow forgot because you're an asshole.

I'm an asshole. And I'll work on that, but I'll probably have Forward/Return playing while I do.