Review: Tiny Leaves - What We Dream Of

The music assembles carefully as if keen not to wake you, like dawning sunlight peering cautiously through an open window. Tremolo guitar rides gentle whispers, synthesiser chord changes sway as softly implied sighs – everything sweeps around my ears with the soft embrace of a pillow, light and friendly in colour and glimmering with optimism ever so slightly. The delicate ambient quilts of Eluvium spring to mind, or perhaps Explosions In The Sky during those moments prior to music rousing itself into a state of assembly; scattered lens flare, flowers unfolding in time lapse.

As each new track begins, the elements reveal themselves to be precisely where you’d expect; a warm ball of tone at the centre, glistening guitar scattered around the edges and the occasional cascade of piano tinkling like tiny drips on water’s surface. This reliability shines a light of safety through the listening experience, obliterating unknowing with routine sound placement and a melodic sensibility that sees each chord falls into the next with a sort of predestined, gravity-adhering inevitability. Even the two remixes avoid straying out of the boundaries of home: Zvuku softens layers of distortion into a cleaning water vapour, while Message To Bears gently aligns the elements within the throb of rhythm, causing violin, guitar and watercolour stroke of choral “aahs” to contract and expand together as one solitary muscle.