You might have heard plenty about the surprise album releases of the likes of Beyonce, Drake and Kendrick Lamar (not quite surprise, but deliberately leaked early) in the past couple of years, but chances are you didn’t see Future of Forestry’s ‘Pages’ fervently written about in Billboard when it was leaked to iTunes on April 1st. That doesn’t make it any less worthy of discussion, however, and is in fact a rather great record that does well to honor and expand the well-trodden indie/Americana style. Says lead vocalist and songwriter Eric Owyoung of the surprise release, “This album is really different than other FOF albums. I didn’t want to spoil it by releasing a few hints or songs ahead of time, so I thought springing a surprise album release would be appropriate. I wanted the listeners to have immediate access to the music and to be moved as much as I was in the season of writing it.”
Eric is right about it being different; ‘Pages’ looks to explore multiple sonic strands while lyrically it conveys waves of loneliness, inner conflict and imperfect love, a wash of simple poetry and minimalist storytelling. Within the narratives we find ourselves staring out to sea, reminiscing over memories both warming and flawed, each new song a continuation of the story and indeed like another page pieced together – as if the book has been ripped apart and is being repaired. The sweet vignettes revealed bit by bit are ambiguous enough that it allows the listener to place themselves within it, but forthright in their truth enough to the point where we do get a sense of progression. “They’re black on white, they’re time pieces left that none could undo,” Eric sings on the title track. “While the memories could hide, all the pages could, the pages would say enough.” It’s as much a simple refrain as it is a mission statement for the entire album.
Lush strings provide the basis for many of the tracks, while other instrumentation provides thematic focus across the songs. ‘Seasons’, for example, is centered around reverberating piano, as is ‘Please Let Me Be’, ‘Pages’, and ‘Someone’ (acoustic version), while percussive acoustic guitar comes to the forefront on ‘Fireflies’, ‘Cross The Oceans’, and their beautiful cover of Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time After Time’, and melodic acoustic guitar shines for ‘Hold My Hand’, ‘Trust’, ‘By The Water’, ‘How To Fly’, and ‘Slowly’. Sometimes the strings rise from the base of which they dwell, and begin to become a fluid part of the main conversation, such as on ‘Learn To Love’, ‘Someone’, and ‘Fireflies’, decorating the arrangements with ballerina-like aplomb. But it’s the vocals that become the most carefully-manipulated as instruments themselves, Eric sometimes taking lead, Alina Kamilchu sometimes doing the same for a female perspective, but most often the pair harmonizing beautifully. This is where they tend to hit their sweet spot as a group, a gradually-building mix guided with the collective voice of Eric and Ali. Here, two is truly better than one, but that’s not to say that the whole group coming together in a choir-like manner isn’t equally as effective. ‘How To Fly’ is one such example, setting alight a track that might have fizzled out without the vocal unison.
Through the fourteen transformative tracks on this record, Future of Forestry have achieved something of a concept album, but wholly a great record. Each track delves deeper and showcases a different shade of emotion, and you feel like you’ve taken a journey when ‘Someone’ finally comes to a close. Almost the opposite, therefore, to the way in which the album was released, but entirely perfect for the nature in which the album should be consumed: all at once, in one sitting, an entire picture. All the pieces fit together.
