Leaves - 'The Angela Test' (Island records) Released 15/08/05

 

Returning after a three-year hiatus with this their second album, the 5-piece Icelandic Leaves display all the sonic riches this Country has been making itself known for. Produced by Marius de Vries who's been working with Bjork and Massive Atttack, the sound is sonicallly-contained, yet rich and venturesome.

'Shakma (Drunken Starlit Sky)', the sterling opening track, is the kind you want to keep to yourself to impress others with your esoteric tastes. With more than shades of Radiohead at work and Pink Floyds 'Dark Side Of The Moon' for atmospherics, it's a 7 minute tumbling track, written with dream-imagery symbolism, and navigating a cinematic sound - it's the kind of track that would have worked well with footage of the Berlin Wall meeting it's end, "...it's a carnival in the air/ and everything seems clear."

Songwriting is shared between all 5 band memebers, yet features a continuity of theme - A Jungian playground of shadow and light, twilight realms of consciousness, moon and death, wings in flight... It's poetic in writing at times and works well on tracks such as 'Killing Flies' - sounding like a broody Beach Boys, with sonic vorteves breaking the calm, "...with your little wings you climb/ I will hunt you till the day you die". 'Silver Night', is an ode to the Natural World, to the restorative and regenerative experiences, "...the place no one has seen".  The title track 'Angela Test' meanwhile explores the duality of the world of plenty with live in, exemplified as Kali, the Destroyer, the world being reduced to a wasteland, the wrath we may invite upon ourselves, "...the dark's rising up with each feather that drops/ We've dug our own hole, with her soul", delivered in a kind of funeral-march.

The play of power between the sexes are explored in 'Good Enough', a driving track with nuances of musical references, "...So tear me up/ And cut me apart/ you suck my blood and eat my heart...". Sounding at times like Coldplay, with swathes and washes of guitar and vocals, the differences lie in the themes and song-writing - apocalyptic yet always aware of the light that causes the shadow, 'Leaves' will finding many new ears on European soil these coming months.