Posts Tagged ‘Milk and Bone’

MILK and BONE – ” Pressure ” and ” New York “

Posted: August 7, 2015 in MUSIC
Tags: , , , ,
0

http://

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

MILK and BONE – ” New York “

Posted: March 11, 2015 in MUSIC
Tags: , ,
0

Montreal duo Milk & Bone make music that seems to inhabit life’s little dramas and unexpected memories.

The characters in their songs sip on coconut water and wonder if their unrequited crushes will ever pan out; they savor simple, satisfying, lustful days. With these small intimacies—made more intimate by the duo’s crystal clear voices and restrained piano melodies,  I imagine all of it unfolding in some sunlit Montreal loft. Their album Little Mourning, which is out March 17th in Canada and March 31 in the US, it sounds almost as if the whole thing could have been made in a few carefree afternoons, the two of them playing piano as warm air blows in through an open window and sweeps up the gauzy curtains.

“We tend to write more songs that are true and raw,” Laurence Lafond-Beaulne,  “I think that people like that. I think that people want to hear the truth even when the truth is not that pretty. I think it feels good to hear, and it feels good to write.”

Milk & Bone, are Lafond-Beaulne and her collaborator Camille Poliquin  who performed standing at keyboards angled to slightly face each other, wearing all black outfits that matched their black hair. Lafond-Beaulne, who performs stage left and is distinguishable by her bangs, pulled out a ukulele for a couple songs, using that instrument’s spare sound to her advantage. Poliquin played a drum pad, adding staggering riffs of bass, and she stunned the room into silence with her soaring vocal solo at the end of “New York.”

Milk & Bone’s formula is simple: It’s pretty much just pianos, vocal harmonies, and lurching groans of electronic bass and drums that hint at skeletal interpretations of dance music. But it’s totally current, and, in the way that it makes those pristine voices the focus,  The duo’s music is immediate and earnest, and it sticks with you as a result. The songs are about, as Poliquin explained, “trust and lust and friendship.” The arresting album opener, “Elephant,” for instance, begins with the matter-of-fact line “his skin is warm, and my lips are starving” before rounding out that feeling with context: “I want you babe, and I won’t stop asking / Just one more night with you is all I’m wanting.”

“Some songs I wrote, it was really just a way of ending past stories,” Lafond-Beaulne said. “To put an end to it, and it really helped.”

The two met as students in the music program at Saint-Laurent, a French-speaking college that’s part of Quebec’s CEGEP system, which students go to between high school and college. Lafond-Beaulne, who grew up reluctantly studying piano before becoming obsessed with classical trombone in high school, entered for jazz trombone but switched to jazz singing. Eventually she’d take up electric bass as well and start touring in French-speaking rock acts. One of these was David Giguère, in whose band she performed alongside Poliquin. About a year and a half ago, another local artist, Misteur Valaire, brought them into the studio to record together as lead vocalists, and they recognized an immediate chemistry, prompting them to start writing together.

“She has amazing creative ideas in the studio,” Lafond-Beaulne said of Poliquin. “I think sometimes I’m still kind of impressed by the studio thing, and I get kind of insecure to just let go. And when she goes in the booth and improvises, it’s beautiful, and it inspires me and helps me move forward and go ‘OK, I can do that too.’” Lafond-Beaulne, on the other hand, brings the group more of the sensitive energy that makes their songs so captivating.

Both are young—Poliquin is 22, and Lafond-Beaulne is 24—and correspondingly earnest, but they have a considerable depth and maturity to their character as well.  Each of those qualities comes across in their songwriting, which is candid and sincere,

“I think we’re not afraid of talking about the dark side of relationships,” Lafond-Beaulne said. She added, “People need true… When we live with something, I tend to internalize it and not really talk about it.” When asked if these songs were about specific people in their lives, both singers laughed and reassured me, “oh yeah.”

Those truths are already connecting. Each of Milk & Bone’s tracks has accrued more attention than the last, with their most recent song, “Pressure,” accumulating more than 300,000 plays on Soundcloud even prior to the album release. Poliquin and Lafond-Beaulne may be approachable and humble about their impressive chops, but their ambitions are unmistakably pop. Although both grew up speaking French, English is every bit as natural, and making songs in English was the obvious choice for pure accessibility. They’ve been deliberate in the way they present themselves, and they’ve been approaching their role as a band with a level of professionalism that’s uncanny for most acts their size.