Born to be mild, the Leaf Library have, across their 11-year career, explored the myriad ways in which a bookish indie band can push at the boundaries of polite, strenuously mannered alternative pop. Having previously strayed into the deep, dark woods of synth-fuelled ambient musings (2019’s The World Is a Bell) and elevated horror-style minimalism (Melody Tomb, their 2022 collaboration with Tokyo electronic artist Teruyuki Kurihara), for their fourth album, the Londoners have plumped for a spooky pastoral ramble that has a spring in its step but is informed always by a quiet, melancholic wonder.
Uncanniness is a defining quality of this brilliantly atmospheric record but it takes its time asserting itself. Amid the bustling jingle-jangle of opener ‘Colour Chant’, first impressions are of an orthodox indie LP with 1990s-style mumblecore vocals – a mournful updating of Lush, say, or Pale Saints or early Piano Magic. Surprises announce themselves stealthily but with conviction – whether as a menacing undertow to Kate Gibson’s meditative lilt on ‘Still & Moving’ or in the way ex-Saloon guitarist Matt Ashton’s chiming playing warily circles an ominous drum line on the off-kilter twee-pop of ‘The Reader’s Lamp’. There are no jump scares, just a feeling that things are slightly off-beam, out of whack, never quite as settled as they should be.
The effect across all nine songs is incrementally yet delightfully unnerving, and is amplified by John McEntire’s mix. As a member of Chicago lo-fi institutions The Sea and Cake and Tortoise, McEntire could have written the manual on whimsical lo-fi with a sinister afterglow and is the perfect midwife to this project. Not that the Leaf Library require any outside help on a record assembled from readily identifiable indie building blocks: wall-of-noise guitars, wispy singing, courteously relentless krautrock drums.
These are the foundation stones of a fair chunk of every alternative album ever made. So why is the effect here so unmooring? That question becomes especially urgent as the matters build to a peak with the closing double punch of the angular ‘Some Circling’ and the despondent dream pop of ‘There Was Always a Golden Age’ – not so much 21st-century shoegaze as a sort of crepuscular ‘boo-gaze’ fuelled by an ever-deepening dread.
The answer is surely buried somewhere deep within an LP that has the loose theme of tramping through the great outdoors and enjoying the sights – but untangling that mystery is no easy task. Stark and tender, After the Rain, Strange Seeds is as gorgeous and marrow-cooling as an outdoor sunset where you’re floored by the beauty but also beginning to wonder if you shouldn’t have brought your coat. There is an eerie majesty threaded through this record that trickles through, burrows under the skin and then keeps going.
