I never thought I’d describe the music of Jimmy LaValle as will follow, as I‘m sure anyone who has ever heard The Album Leaf before would be wont to agree (and if that first listen was on The O.C., don‘t worry, I won‘t judge), but A Chorus of Storytellers is an album of extremes: extreme beauty, to be certain, but also extreme frustration. It’s an album I want to love, and it’s very close to being lovable, but there is something preventing that from happening.

This is not to say that the album isn’t enjoyable -  far from it, in fact. LaValle is an undeniably talented multi-instrumentalist, and every song is incredibly lush, in an almost subdued fashion. It’s just as soft-sounding as the cover art would have us believe. The tracks with vocals aren’t obtrusive, either, and as a matter of fact the singing contributes to some of the better songs on the record. The understated  catchiness of “Falling From the Sun” is a clear example of this. There is, thankfully, no radical discrepancy between the “instrumental” songs and the “vocal” songs: LaValle’s singing doesn’t force the song structure around itself in a verse-chorus-verse fashion, and the voice is treated as just another layer, another sound more than an obtuse mandatory-vocal-track.

However, for every such step forward in structural niceties, there is an accompanying step backward. The structure of an album as a whole is sadly predictable and in-line with other recent efforts by The Album Leaf, with a near-perfect alternation between instrumental and vocal songs somewhat eliminating the previously-mentioned impression that the vocals were added organically. The album structure feels much too calculated for music so lovely, and as each song clocks in somewhere around four minutes, there is very little (or, in this case, not any) room for deviations in tempo and arrangement.

What we are left with are eleven songs of wonderfully uplifting, gorgeous lullaby-esque music: gentle strings, piano melodies, synth drones, and mercifully inconspicuous drum machine beats. It’s certainly hard to knock the sound of the album, really, as everything is in its right place, but that in itself becomes Storyteller’s shortcoming. Everything is too much in the right place, and as the album enters its second half the flow feels more tedious and one-dimensional than coherent. By the end of it all, there is a feeling that not every track really needed to be there, as many are redundant in terms of instrumentation, feel, and even idea. A Chorus of Storytellers is certainly pretty, but also remarkably shallow. It's a lovely trip while it lasts, but not one we’ll need to take again anytime soon.

-Calvin Young