Milk and Bone are Camille Poliquin and Laurence Lafond-Beaulne from Montreal Canada.
The background: Milk & Bone are a duo from French-speaking Canada, and there is a breathy Gallic lilt to their voices, although they sing in English. They sound almost eerily enchanting, like Aluna George with a dark secret, or a less full-bodied stereo Suzanne Vega. You will either warm to their cool dispassion or go cold. Suffice to say that, for all the easy pleasures of their dreamy, slow-tempo electronic pop/R&B, they offer ample opportunity to violently loathe them. The music on their debut “Little Mourning” EP is lush and lovely, lo-fi yet luxuriant. It is made, we’re guessing, largely on laptops, and it’s immensely cute. But for some the balance will be all wrong, and they will dismiss it as cutesy.
Their single Pressure has already had 1m Soundcloud plays, and they’ve already won fans in Austin (SXSW) and Paris (David Lynch’s Silencio) this year, playing their intimate songs about disappointment and claustrophobia and petty crises concerning characters who sip on coconut water while wondering if their unrequited crushes will ever work out. “We tend to write songs that are true and raw,” Lafond-Beaulne, the Bone to Poliquin’s Milk, said recently. “I think that people like that. I think that people want to hear the truth, even when the truth is not that pretty
Milk & Bone wrap their raw truths in very pretty packages. They cite as inspiration Blood Orange, Solange, James Blake, Purity Ring and Chvrches, and say they write their songs on Lafond-Beaulne’s ukulele, before covering the melodies in synths. Songs start slowly, then build, in their own quiet way, to epic climaxes. Elephant starts with a siren, but that’s just about the last dissonant note struck on the EP. Easy to Read, like everything here, is deceptively “nice”. Meanwhile, the lyrics (“My time is too short”, “I’m stuck, I can’t move”, “This is not going well – the doors keep on closing”, “The water is trouble … there are rapids ahead”) provide the “bitter” to the music’s “sweet”. Pressure, we’ll concede, is overly twee, but that is easily made up by New York, which has none of the triumphalist air of the Alicia Keys NYC paean and more of the lustrous darkness of Laura Nyro’s New York Tendaberry.
The Little Mourning EP is out now on Honeymoon
The Fat Angel Sings 