Timely and on point, Unfurl by The Falling Leaves is a marriage of classic and contemporary folk. Rife with great picking and bluegrass style rolls and licks, the album moves in slow, driving cadences, at times half Modest Mouse, half Bill Monroe. The musicianship is crisp, clean and decidedly assured.
All over, the record sparkles with slides on the fiddle, shimmering dobro and beautiful interjections from the guitar and banjo. The interplay is lovely to listen to. It feels both continuous and full-circle as it is passed freely from instrument to instrument with conversational ease.
However, the album never quite reaches a full head of steam, relying instead on the soundness of its musical fundamentals and quality of play. This is not a bad thing, the members of The Falling Leaves are great students of their strings, and yet the way the tracks never quite crescendo may leave the listener expecting more.
Similarly, the album lacks significant thrust in its vocals. Often talk-sung, they miss the assuredness of the instrumentation they accompany. At times they come out nasally and slightly incongruous with the backwash of scintillating picking, while at others they feel right at home with the raspy styles and sultry moods of garage folk, or the quiet introspection of slow numbers. Ultimately however, not all the elements of the picture align and the vocal effort falls slightly short of the hallmarks of a decisive range and maturity.
Lyrically, Unfurl understands itself, moving in earnest, while opening pages on the themes of connectedness, self-discovery and environment. The track, “Pipeline” explores the environmental and social cost of fossil fuel drilling, and the mentality that propels it, with clarity and simplicity
Plant your seed in soil with a bucket of oil,
Bring the glyphosate water to boil…
Our small town is lost in the rising costs,
But our saviour has come to make more jobs…
“Still Water”, on the other hand, is a quiet meditation on time and the process of life, rolling out with considered tenderness and feeling, while “Vibrations” explores ideas of individual smallness and universal connectedness.
Unfurl is an eager and sincere first effort from a band set to discover and grow their sound, and while in some instances it misses its mark, it still flows with an ebullience and passion that is palpable. It is exciting to imagine where, in the future, these leaves will fall.