With his placid, polite approach to post-rock, one would be hard-pressed to guess that The Album Leaf frontman Jimmy LaValle can list spazzy groups Swing Kids, GoGoGo Airheart and especially The Locust in his musical CV. One decade and five full-length albums into this incarnation, LaValle has erased all traces of his hardcore past, and therein lies the rub: A Chorus of Storytellers is the sonic equivalent of Paul Reiser in Mad About You.

The tones are warm, the melodies wistful and the twitchy electronics accented by strings, keys and glockenspiels. In other words, while LaValle aims for an orchestral take on Boards of Canada or its Calgary brethren Azeda Booth, he ends up with soundtrack music of the most pedestrian. To wit, perhaps the least surprising footnote is that his songs have already appeared on Grey’s Anatomy, CSI and The O.C.