Eastern Glow Vinyl, CD & Tape 2 Items

Limited burnt orange vinyl LP pressing. Original motion picture soundtrack to the 2009 film Torey's Distraction performed by Jimmy LaValle (The Album Leaf). Sometimes the child you have isn't the one you were expecting... What if you gave birth to a child with a rare genetic defect? Would you let nature take it's course or would you do all you could to give your child a normal life? Recent medical advances are saving the lives of children born with Apert Syndrome, but to live a normal life one must look normal and this is where the journey of Torey's Distraction begins. Filmed over a period of 10 years, the film follows Torey, Emily and Saige - all children born with Apert Syndrome - a rare genetic condition that causes craniofacial anomalies and skeletal mutation. Blood's directorial debut provides an intimate glimpse into the transforming powers of science, family, humor, hope and compassion.

Jimmy LaValle’s The Album Leaf has spun from solo outlet to full band and back in its nearly 25 years. His acclaimed catalog spans releases for labels such as Sub Pop, City Slang, Relapse, and others. He also composes music for film and television, scoring over 20 projects (narrative features, documentaries, and TV series) since 2009. The cinematic sensibilities of The Album Leaf were present from the beginning. His 1999 debut introduced the start of a signature sound: melodic and meditative electro-organic soundscapes constructed with guitar, percussion, Rhodes, and field recordings.

His seventh full-length LP, and first since 2016, arrives in 2023 via Vancouver’s Nettwerk Records. Future Falling finds LaValle working with an array of musicians, shaping slightly darker, more spacious, and synth-driven songs with contributions from Bat For Lashes, Kimbra, and many others.

The music registers a shade darker and more synth-driven than most moments in his acclaimed catalog, a bridge between shadowy, cerebral terrain and dreamy precision pop, where softly percussive frameworks meet shimmering sound design and emotive instrumentation.

LaValle sees the construction of Future Falling as less conventional than past work. Contributions were done remotely with a “throw everything at it” mindset, making LaValle the arranger of layers from all over: drums, synths, horns, violins, voice, and more. LaValle created a pastiche of these layers and elements; in some cases even moving vocal takes to new tracks entirely. Without the in-the-room dynamics, he had more time to experiment, adding and subtracting ad infinitum.

The album opens on “PROLOGUE,” an evocative, slow-building instrumental that rides a pattern into a symphonic sea of static. Keys and horns glide atop the rhythmic pulse of “dust COLLECTS,” setting the contemplative scene for “AFTERGLOW,” the record’s most pop-minded performance. Here Kimbra, the Grammy-winning New Zealand singer-songwriter, renders a striking recollection of past love as percussive elements shimmer and swirl.

A plaintive piano line moves throughout “Cycles 19.9” encircled by light ambient washes, both a valley between two peaks and a powerful composition in its own right. “Future Falling” follows; with origins tracing back to 2015, the track embodies the full sonic journey LaValle has taken. All the hallmarks of The Album Leaf — melodic builds, vivid sprawl, tonal shape-shifting — assemble to a blissful finish.

For the next stretch, “Cycles” begins with a uneasy Rhodes loop that builds and erupts into a wall of texture paving its way into “Give In,” where LaValle models a movement that begins subtle and measured before curving up with skyward, percussive bursts (“Stride”) and settling back down to the album’s back-half centerpiece, “Near” featuring the acclaimed English artist Natasha Khan aka Bat For Lashes. “Do you feel me near?” she sings into a mist of widescreen synths and soothing, distant drum beats as if searching through the dark.