The Album Leaf and Sea Wolf at The El Rey

Over a decade has passed since Jimmy LaValle, former guitarist of San Diego’s Tristeza, began experimenting with synthesizers and digital pianos. On Saturday, following the release of his fifth studio LP A Chorus of Storytellers, LaValle brought his resultant creation, The Album Leaf, to the comforts of the El Rey for a night of sonic, symphonic meditation.

Mixed by LaValle and fellow post-rock master Jonsi Birgisson of Sigur Ros, Chorus is the first Album Leaf disc to feature the talents of LaValle’s live band members in the recording process. All of these players, including violinist Matthew Resovich and former Rogue Wave guitarist Gram LeBron, turned up for the show, accompanied by San Francisco’s Magik*Magik String Quartet.

LaValle, sporting a handsome black vest, emerged before a hushed crowd just past 10:30 p.m. After some awkward repositioning of musicians (there were eleven in total, making for quite the packed stage) and equipment, LaValle led the band through the new album’s first five tracks.

The show took some time to come together, much like the songs themselves. Surrounded by icicles of LED lights and projected images of fingernails, plant skins, water and other things that would make David Lynch grin, the band seemed to be groping for ideal tones. LaValle pounded away at his piano on “Blank Pages” and murmured the quiet verses of “There is a Wind” as the band tried to fill in the empty spaces.

By the time “Falling From The Sun” came around, The Album Leaf began to find its footing, ratcheting up the atmospherics with a series of elegant vocal harmonies over spare guitar notes and a lush landscape of strings from the quartet, which managed to make the best of being wedged into a corner of the stage.

The band’s decision to play the first half of its new album in succession speaks of its own departures from the minimalist style made popular by LaValle in his earlier days. Most notable is the growing inclusion of pop-inclined vocals in The Album Leaf’s material, arguably the riskiest step LaValle has taken in recent years.

Eventually, the band seamlessly delved into its older material. The glacial notes of “2214” and “The Outer Banks” evoked roars, and then entranced silence as LaValle and the band built towards pulverizing crescendos of beautiful, alien melodies.

From that point, the band never lost elevation, wandering through favorites like “Shine” and “Wherever I Go.” Even “We Are” and other newer material felt stronger and more alive here, maintaining a powerful realm of transcendent, melancholic peace. Thanks to an unusually fantastic sound arrangement, every instrument could be heard with touching resonance.

The night’s sensory highlight came during the encore. As the band performed “Red-Eye,” clouds of steam and thick layers of white noise slowly filled the room like salt water, enveloping band and audience in an aural mist of piercing notes and unsettling rumbles. If you closed your eyes, you could almost feel the North Sea winds tickling your chin, buoys of lights dancing in the fog.

Jimmy LaValle has been a musician long enough to understand the importance of aesthetic evolution. His ambitious composition, more layered and thoughtful on every record, has kept The Album Leaf from sinking into the bland tediousness that has consumed Explosions In The Sky and other post-rock outfits.

The new and more traditionally structured songs are admirable, necessary even, in their adventurousness, but they have no doubt polarized LaValle’s fans. Their live debut at the El Rey was sometimes moving, but also underwhelming. At one point, it was possible to hear both LaValle and a nearby couple debating whether to dine at Pink’s or Roscoe’s following the show.

Still, whichever direction The Album Leaf decides to take on its next studio outing, the El Rey show was hardly a breakaway from its most beloved material. If anything, its performance was a transporting and often exhilarating journey through the last 10 years of its existence in a world still largely ruled by consumable, predictable, manufactured artists.

Los Angeles native Sea Wolf opened for The Album Leaf, showcasing much material off its new album White Water, White Bloom. Alex Brown Church’s penetrating, lazy-eyed gaze hardly left the crowd as he lead the band through a warm, enthralling set, marked by Nathan Anderson’s reverberant guitars, dizzying cello work from Joyce Lee and a truly great performance of “You’re A Wolf.”