After the Rain, Strange Seeds

Across numerous releases since they formed in the mid-2000s, Londons the Leaf Library have experimented with everything from a gentle fusion of indie pop and post-rock to experimental indie electronica, noise, and drone minimalism. With their fourth studio album, After the Rain, Strange Seeds, the group wanted to prioritize more-traditional, structured songwriting over sounds and atmosphere. Longtime fans will likely be happy to learn that the results are still notably textured and adventurous. To start, they combine distorted, slowcore-adjacent rock timbres, strings (by guests Iskra Strings), and lightly bouncy, sweet vocal harmonies on the deceptively tuneful "Colour Chant," a song inspired by shifting weather. As the album title implies, the great outdoors informs other tracks as well, including the melancholier "Sun in My Room," a winding indie pop tune with guitar, woodwinds, organ, and warm percussion. While consistently reflective, the album takes a more narcotic turn on tracks including the slower and more repetitive "A Ship in the Sky," which includes occasional gong-like cymbal strikes. (It may be worth noting here that there are dedicated harpsichord, flugelhorn, and synthesizer players among the albums guest list.) There are also tracks called "Some Circling" and "Still & Moving," the latter being a nearly nine-minute epic based within the same palette but more expansively layered, and the former serving as the closest thing to a danceable psych-pop. Its rooted in syncopated guitar rhythms and an alternately lush and gravelly shimmer. Taken together, its a set that, like much of Stereolabs output, welcomes the art-school kids, stoners, and indie pop sentimentalists alike. ~ Marcy Donelson