At its start, All The Leaves Are Gone heeds Lady Macbeth's advice and looks like the flower. For the first few minutes of album opener "Well-Heeled Man", Josephine Foster lips pretty whatnots over sparse guitar action, echoing both her work with Jason Ajemian as Born Heller and "Little Life", her stand out contribution to Devendra Banhart's recent neo-folk compilation Golden Apples of the Sun. And then the serpent rears its head: Drums roll, cymbals crash, acoustic guitars fight an electric improvisational warrior-- from pretty much herein, All the Leaves Are Gone is a bloodthirsty rock album, hot and curdling till the last man bites the Martian grass.
Moving from "sparse Appalachian folk" to "bloodthirsty rock" seems like a huge gap not to mind, but the protean Foster proves she can do either of them convincingly. On her own, she acquires the intimate affectations of Shirley Collins with a weird twist of opera bravado; with the support of backing band The Supposed, Foster remains operatic but the excess rock energy triggers her Joan Baez and Cat Power reflexes. All of which is to say: Foster's vocal range-- vertically or theatrically-- never poses any issues here. The Old Dawson Prater Wives' Tale that Foster originally conceived All the Leaves Are Gone as a rock musical doesn't seem out of the question: Foster's empowered delivery makes her hooks stick even more than in her sparser outfits, as if the whole album is designed to be whistle-worthy fare for departing theatergoers. It would not surprise if some indie rock visionary takes Foster's songs here and writes a brilliant accompanying stage play.
Until that time, the songs alone will more than suffice. The album's title track offers its own antidote for the bleak house it pitches ("There is no end to your sorrow") with an Eastern-tinged electric guitar closely trailing Foster's matter-of-fact melody until the two miraculously consummate. "Deathknell" is surprisingly amelodic for Foster-- the vocals stay buried deep in her throat-- but the choice is disastrously effective, lending a sense of dread to Foster's anxious chorus, "I had a mother, mother had a mother, no one remembers their name." Foster and The Supposed run circles around themselves on the blazing "Jailbird (Hero of the Sorrow)", which teems with electric guitar-vocal counterpoint and innumerably distinct mega-riffs.
Unfortunately, The Supposed's electric guitarist can be pretty annoying. It's unclear who he thinks he is, or what band he thinks he's in, or what song he thinks he's jazzing up on tracks like "Who Will Feel Better at the Days End?", which starts promisingly with double-plucks snatched off Tim Buckley's Starsailor but degenerates into high-speed wankery reminiscent of the high school pit band guitarist who doesn't know how to read music, so he "just plays whatever." The same problem exists on "The Most Loved One" and album closer "(You Are Worth) A Million Dollars": The guy is clearly well trained, but his improvisations more than often detract from Foster, who is (deservedly) the principal here. Let's not quibble, though: All the Leaves Are Gone is theatrical, occasionally vaudevillian, and-- like Foster's earlier offerings this year-- is never wasteful or impassionate.
