Any other Wednesday morning would have opened with a shock into consciousness at precisely 6:30 a.m. I tend to respond by rolling slightly to the right, just enough to smite the snooze button and earn myself another nine minutes. But on this particular morning, I gave myself a few extra hours to recover from the previous night's three-hour haul from Washington, D.C.
I'd been in D.C. for a concert by Pitchfork heartthrobs Sigur Rós. The Album Leaf (aka Tristeza's Jimmy LaValle) opened the show accompanied by another guitarist and synth player, a bassist, and a drummer. I suppose the band was effective in setting the mood with their unsurprising washes of Fender Rhodes, delayed guitar lines, and well, pretty much delayed everything. And while their performance was fairly forgettable, their simplicity mellowed the crowd in the only way appropriate before we were to be enveloped in the gorgeousness of our glacial Icelanders.
So yeah, I woke up around 10:30 (the wallpaper contractor I'd set an appointment with a few days earlier finally roused my sleepy ass out of bed by banging 100,000 times on the front door). Cardboard boxes were strewn across the floor of my room, all of which had arrived while I was out the day before, most bearing the "Insound" return address. These were empty, of course, and a stack of unwrapped discs sat patiently on my desk. I glanced at the new music with a bit of indecisiveness, then pulled out the Album Leaf's One Day I'll Be on Time from somewhere near the bottom of the pile.
I wasn't excepting anything spectacular from the record, and as it turned out, there were no surprises. "Gust of..." gently opens with-- shock!-- a droning organ before proceeding into pretty homogenous figures of arpeggiating organ and synthlines. Homogenous, that is, to the entire record. Every few songs we get a bit of guitar, and if we're lucky, drums or drum-machine. But for the most part, One Day I'll Be on Time is about minimalism: minimal song variation, minimal melodic creativity, minimal staying power.
There are, of course, a few instrumental pop numbers for contrast. "In Between Lines," a prime example, wouldn't have sounded out of place on U2's last record. (This is not a compliment.) Interlocking lines of delayed guitar hit it off with lighthearted beat programming and facile synth ornaments. Perhaps the banality of the track could have been maximized had Bono been called in to sing over it.
The record isn't an utter waste, though; a couple moments of serenity are sequenced well enough to save it from total abandonment. The best of these comes with "Story Board." The track seems to have been recorded with a single compressor microphone in a room with the windows open, letting the sounds of highway traffic seep in. We imagine LaValle hunched over his acoustic guitar in an asinine mockery of Nick Drake's disconsolate poses. Here, the subtle Rhodes overdubs, rather than seeming contrived, complement the circular patterns of guitar quite calmly.
But the bulk of One Day I'll Be on Time's remaining duration, despite the genre in which this record could easily be pigeonholed, is far from easy listening. "Vermillion" all too dangerously approaches new age cheese; "Hang Over" is like an inebriated guitarist stumbling over his own minimalism; and "Glimmer," the album's closer, is... wait, I already used "new age," right?
By the time the record ended, I'd forgotten about the wallpaper guy, who had already nearly finished putting up the new pattern downstairs. As I descended, he asked me what it was I'd been listening to. "The Album Leaf." He mentioned that he was also a massage therapist (I'm thinking he's like that guy on "The Pretender" who can do anything), and that he thought the album would be "very appropriate" for his massage sessions. Considering the nature of the album, that possibility didn't seem too remote.
Somehow, the conversation got around to ambient music and Brian Eno (What can I say? This guy is The Pretender!). I contended that Brian Eno is a virtuoso of space, which contributes to the dynamism of his ambient works, and that James LaValle simply changes instruments to create what ends up being an artificial dynamic. The contractor agreed, but then reminded me that even Brian Eno has produced a few U2 records.
