"Over a decade in the making, the Album Leaf is just now hitting its stride." —Prefix

"...gently eases you into his mostly instrumental world, where shimmering keyboards float around sweeping strings and understated beats." —Spin

"...twinkling poptronica that could be arguably cast aside as new age if it weren't cut with just enough post-rock and IDM textures." —Pitchfork

There are roads we all must travel to get where we need to be.

Okay, right, that sounds utterly trite and cliché, but to paraphrase Lloyd Cole, it's a cliché because it's true. In the case of music, almost all artists start out with a roadmap. A nice, tidy conceptualization of what they want their message to be, what they hope to accomplish and, more pressingly, what they want people to hear in the songs.

It's never been so systematic and apple-pie for The Album Leaf. Originally conceived and, for the most part, exectued by one Jimmy LaValle, the project has never had a fatalist approach even over the course of 12 years, hundreds of songs, dozens of tours, several sojourns to Iceland and more mood-setting appearances on The O.C.  and C.S.I. than anyone cares to remember. Whether it took the form of a man crafting entire soundscapes in a room or as five or so musicians onstage, there's never been any rules to what The Album Leaf could be and, in the case of Forward/Return, what it can or continue to sound like.

What you are about to listen to (well, hopefully you are) isn't the sound of a straight line or even as the crow flies. It's the sound of forks in the road and the ones less traveled by. LaValle's own journey has taken him up and down California and back again over the last few years, and the songs on Forward/Return revolve loosely around that feeling of starting over (over and over again). The beauty of returning home again. The pensiveness that comes with finding a new one.

Recorded and produced in Lavalle's new home studio in Los Angeles, the EP includes both new contributors as well as some familiar hands. It also continues in the spirit of the last Album Leaf LP (2010's A Chorus of Storytellers) in that the songs were performed by a full band and not just by LaValle himself. But the similarties end there. Listeners can look at most EPs in one of two ways: As an extentsion of what came before (read: leftovers from the previous full-length) or as an exercise in trying something new. The beginning of a new chapter, a testing of creative invigoration or just dipping one's proverbial toe into new imaginative waters.

The first Album Leaf record to be self-released in quite some time, Forward/Return has the distinction of being both a return to form as well as the beginning of something altogether novel. As BBC Music remarked of the last Album Leaf release, "There is, in it's overall serene, melancholic sweep, a sense of a long journey undertaken, whose good outcome is assured and yet which is tinged throughout with the vague sadness that accompanies any such oddysey—the loss of that which is left behind, as well as the knowledge that arrival will bring the process of travelling to an end."

For The Album Leaf, the end of that journey has never been predetermined. All musicians reache an epoch and for LaValle and his mates, the paths they've created in the past aren't meant to be retreaded. Forward/Return is that arrival as well as the first step forward on a new path. As LaValle so delicately serenades on "Under The Night," "We're starting over... We're starting over again."