Tipped by Grimes,hear are a band from Montreal.She-Devils are an icy, untamed Montréal duo whose sample-heavy output made our jaws drop at the tail end of 2015. Singer Audrey Ann has one of the most mesmerising voices around, and there’s a dreamlike quality to their material that feels coolly cinematic
Simple but hypnotic retro-sounding 60’s cool pop that is constructed using samples. This young Montreal duo has been getting much buzz on blogs.
Extremely psyched to hear the debut single and the video from Montreal minimalist avant-pop duo Audrey Ann and Kyle Jukka, know as the She Devils. On their forthcoming EP, the group (who have been making waves in their hometown with their compelling gigs, brilliantly meld warped, exquisitely selected samples with Audrey Ann’s stark, swaying melodies to create deceptively simple jams that seem to draw from ’60s French pop, vintage surf rock, obscure exotica, and heartfelt dream-pop, resulting in something sort of modernly timeless and eliciting haunting, almost Lynchian dream sequence vibes. She-Devils claim to have “no interest in exhibiting any kind of refined musicality,” but “rather intend on creating impressions that burrow into the heart and imagination,” and they certainly nail the latter part of that mission statement on the sweetly trippy self-directed video for the hypnotic and infinitely replayable “Come“:
We made a video! We’re announcing an EP! We’re going on tour!
This is my official statement about the video hehe :
Visually Kyle really likes 90s TV and I’m more into 50s glamour, I’d say thats what went into this video. We shot it in my bedroom with the help of a couple friends (Neil Corcoran, Devon Welsh.) It was simple and very fun and I think it shows. Both of us love cinema and are acutely affected by colours. It was our first time making a music video. It feels really good to make something visual that is in harmony with our music.
More Faithful is the third record by Montreal’s No Joy, and by far their most successful work at making the commonplace tics of shoegaze seem strange and wonderful again. Instead of straining their volume further or pushing their distortion even harder, the band unclutters. They make room in the mix for strong, if circuitous vocal melodies. On a gorgeous song like “Moon in My Mouth”, they slow down to a bobbing waltz. There are noise bursts too, but subtle layering builds-up without burying. These songs display real confidence, declining to confuse.
Ought formed just three years ago amid a burgeoning DIY scene in Montreal’s Mile End district. While drawing heavily from sonic inspirations like Talking Heads, Sonic Youth and The Fall, the group fashioned a sound of its own over the course of their two albums and two EPs.
Recently, Ought stopped by KEXP to reveal songs from its refreshing new album, “Sun Coming Down” — which, despite its sometimes anxious post-punk gloom, feels like a sun coming up on a new day. Ought performing live in the KEXP studio. Recorded October 15, 2015.
SET LIST
Men For Miles
Beautiful Blue Sky
The Weather Song
Passionate Turn
“The Ridge” by Sarah Neufeld (2016, from the forthcoming album The Ridge).
Sarah Neufeld is a violinist and composer working out of Montréal. In 1997, she and the brilliant ambient-electronic/noise/drone musician Tim Hecker moved from Vancouver to Montréal. Although it took a while, she eventually became deeply entrenched in the Montréal/Constellation Records post-rock scene. She was a full-time member of The Arcade Fire for a while, and is still a contributor. She’s also been a member of Belle Orchestre, and The Luyas. In addition, she’s collaborated with Rebecca Foon on albums by Esmerine and the band Saltland.
In the late aughts, she started to write her own stuff, separate from the work with those numerous projects. She finally released her solo debut Hero Brotherin 2013, then an EP called Black Ground last year. Her sophomore album The Ridge will be out in early 2016.
Earlier this year, Neufeld made an astounding album with Colin Stetson , and had a successful tour in support of it. It’s my understanding that she’s going to tour extensively in support of the new album, which is scheduled for release on February 26th, 2016 via Paper Bag Records . I just got something in the mailbag about the forthcoming release, and it’s a no-brainer for me to feature it here.
Jeremy Gara from The Arcade Fire plays drums on the new album, and while it’s mostly instrumental, and mostly centered around the violin, Neufeld does sing a bit. From what I’ve heard, it’s more “vocalizing” than “singing”, but whatever it is she’s doing, it’s magical the way her voice plays off the violin.
I love how it gets crazily busy right smack in the middle of the song, right around 4:10. The drums get a little heavier, and there’s some other musicians in the mix there, but I don’t know any of those details. It’s like organized chaos and beauty together.
If this song is any indication, I’m going to absolutely love the album. From the looks of things, 2016 is going to get off to a roaring start. Especially with albums by Canadian artists. I can’t wait.
Breakup records are nothing new. They’re one of the most practiced concoctions in pop music today but every now and then, one comes along that pushes the art form in new directions. “Deep in the Iris”, the third album from Montreal trio Braids, is one such album. Rather than continuing the evolution of their former sound—as displayed on 2013’s stark, searing “Flourish//Perish” the band instead takes a softer, sunnier approach. While the lyrics are as cutting and introspective as anything you’ll come across, the music is anything but. Departing from jarring arrangements, the band employs warm Björk-esque beats and inviting rhythmic soundscapes as a backdrop to Raphaelle Standell’s stunning vocal work. Deep in the Iris doesn’t so much explore new depths as it does new heights. It isn’t the sound of fracturing, but the healing process.
Braids “Deep In The Iris” LP
Out 28th April on Arbutus Records / Flemish Eye.
There’s placid grace to Deep In The Iris, the third and latest full-length by Braids, but don’t let that fool you. Something’s churning beneath the album’s calm, cool surface. Unlike Flourish // Perish, the Montreal trio’s icy, challenging record from 2013, Deep In The Iris represents a thaw: Throughout its nine songs, singer RaphaelleStandell-Preston and her cohorts Taylor Smith and Austin Tufts art-rock with melodic allure, confessional directness and quivering warmth. Where Flourish // Perish used prickly electronics and cavernous arrangements to hold humanity at arm’s length,Deep In The Iris turns those same elements into lulling hymns to cleansing and redemption. Braids is not only more approachable than ever; it’s downright magnetic.
Her breathy vocals, as liquid and acrobatic as ever, elevate a line that in lesser hands would have seemed clichéd. Meanwhile, the band underscores the bittersweet melancholy with hypnotic patterns of percussion and synths. The hooks are subtle, but they’re huge.
That boldness, both instrumentally and lyrically, is even more striking in “Miniskirt.” In the past, Standell-Preston has couched her lyrics in a haze of poetic abstraction; here, she goes for the throat, calling out misogyny, the male gaze and the language of slut-shaming with piercing, confessional force. The song could almost pass as an epic R&B ballad, at least at first: After a sumptuous, stadium-worthy intro, it corkscrews through a tangle of jittery beats and atmospheric eeriness that never wanders into self-indulgence. Even within the album’s most complex and confrontational track, there’s an immaculate pop edge that mesmerizes.
By the time “Warm Like Summer” bursts into a dazzle of soulful croons, glimmering loops and shuffling drums, it appears that the album’s springtime release is no accident: This is the sound of renewal and regrowth, as joyful and as painful as that can be. In “Letting Go,” Standell-Preston sings with dreamy contentment, “We laid on the bank and had our fill.” On the lush, stuffed-to-bursting Deep In The Iris, Braids has done exactly that.
Ought is a band that beautifully thrives off of the mundane. When thinking about their impeccable past work, their songs are almost like loaded streams of consciousness; conversational admissions slowly turning into epiphanies though the duration of the carefully delivered, passionate instrumentals. They derive inspiration from anxiety, from the coinciding fear and distaste for the future, from the little inexplicable things that make humans, well, human while at the same time comforts in the way it assures the beautiful ordinariness of everyday life. Perhaps this is why the Montreal quintet’s debut More Than Any Other Day was such a brilliant and thoughtful album, and that massive success transposes itself into into the emotionally lighter Sun Coming Down, their fantastic sophomore release.
While they are a band born out of protest, Ought’s music has never gorged itself on rage or unrest – not even in their fiery debut, where stark instrumentals and shouts into the void are put on display. Rather, the band generally seems to gracefully express their subtle distaste for their surroundings and their current situations through simple, tastefully orchestrated instrumentals and educated, intellectual commentary as anxiously dictated by frontman Tim Darcy, who yelps rather than sings. That system is further practiced in Sun Coming Down, where Ought remove their weathered armor after their ascent into epiphany, and instead take comfort in exposing a soft, yet toughened underbelly. There are fewer moments of intense realization, and there aren’t exactly any equivalents to the stunning ballad “Habit” or those specific feelings. However, in the way that this album is orchestrated, it doesn’t need one, and spends more time addressing as many things as possible with an added emphasis on emotional depth.
Opener “Men for Miles” is exactly the kind of track to start things off with, based on it’s unyielding, unrelenting nature of Darcy’s frantic, mile-a-minute vocals and the fact that the instrumentals seem to do their own dance, which is succeeded with the fervid, energetic track “The Combo.” The vocals and lyrics are really the main focal point of the album, whether its meaning or the sounds in which the actual words make. The only time it takes a breather is in “Passionate Turn,” where the band executes their most “romantic” song to date. “Beautiful Blue Sky” further explores their underlying theme of the mundane, but here we hear Darcy listing random grievances with modern life before exploding into a slew of run of the mill questions fit to ask standing around a water cooler or a work barbecue (“How’s the family?/ How’s your health been?/ Fancy seeing you here!”), repeating them incessantly to the point of suffocation. Towards the middle of the song he interrupts himself with a blatant yesas if to show his contentment with all methods of living life, which seems to sum up the album’s intent to embrace the ebb and flow of the everyday, or simply the release of tension. One of Ought’s greatest strengths is talking about the mundane without actually personifying its monotonous nature, and Sun Coming Down is chock full of examples. Where the album really shines is in it’s moments of repetition in the lyrics, something in which I feel that only a few bands can successfully pull off. However, the track that really makes this album a stunner for me is the mercurial track “On the Line,” where the band does something riskier and fresher in composition. It flawlessly switches between spoken word poetry with vivid imagery and a fast, unapologetic guitar track in a frantic daze before dissolving passionately into submission. The instrumentals linger on Darcy’s every word, showing off their group dynamic and proves their abilities to become one unrelenting force. It’s a track that solidifies Ought further for me personally, not including More Than Any Other Day‘s “Pleasant Heart.” The album closes with the impassioned track “Never Better,” leaving a jagged edge and a sense of fulfillment.
Sun Coming Down is the contented, more relaxed follow up to More Than Any Other Day, but it is presented in a way that begs for it to be further embraced and understood just like its predecessor. While I do prefer the darkened, cynical edges of their debut, I still appreciate the fastidiousness in which they complete projects, and the fact that this album came as a complete surprise to me was what made me love it even more. The endearing qualities about Ought is that they always try to maintain a level-head while also entertaining the desires of madness and passion in their music, and the fact that they always help you take comfort in your own skin.
Ought – ‘Sun Coming Down’
New album out 18th September 2015 on Constellation Records,Ought returns with their second full-length album Sun Coming Down, following a break-out year for the Montréal-based rock quartet that saw its 2014 debut More Than Any Other Day make well-deserved waves for its blend of authentic, anxious, controlled and restive energy, with a Best New Music nod from Pitchfork and appearances on a wide range of year-end lists.
Having spent most of 2014 on the road vitalizing audiences with no-nonsense post-punk and the feverishly observational testifying of singer/guitarist Tim Darcy (who officially changed his name from Tim Beeler this year), Ought settled into a long harsh Montreal winter hibernation, spending the first few months of 2015 writing, playing the occasional local gig, and eventually heading back to the Hotel2Tango recording studio in the spring to lay down a batch of fresh tunes.
Sun Coming Down maintains the band’s tight, twitchy and economical sound, with the unfussy, understated rhythm section of drummer Tim Keen and bassist Ben Stidworthy anchoring Tim Darcy’s electric guitar and Matt May’s fuzzed-out keys (sounding, as often as not, like a second guitar). Ought pursue an artistically apposite austerity in committing these new songs to tape, no-wave and early indie rock while balancing carved-out angularity It makes for an album that’s consistently, insistently propulsive but also feels unhurried and pleasantly unhyped. Songs like “Beautiful Blue Sky” (already a fan favorite from live shows) and “Never Better” unfold with gradual and deliberate ebb and flow, where scratchy guitars play like dappled shards of light on gently roiling waves of bass and organ; “The Combo” and “Celebration” keep things crisp and concise. Darcy’s voice and lyrics continue to distinguish and define the personality of the band: his blend of ironic detachment, fragmentary stammering poetics, and the occasional direct aside to the listener, Sun Coming Down confirms the distinctive vitality of this band; Ought The band’s steady and subtle charms don’t make them the cool kids or the iconoclastic freaks – just a satisfyingly unrefined and substantive rock band that eschews indulgence or aesthetic band wagoneering to seek a humble, thoughtful corner from which to articulate a position within and contribute meaningfully to a 40-year continuum of indie, punk and DIY tradition.
Directed by 2013 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Short Films winnerKahlil Joseph, and produced by award-winning studio Pulse Films (20,000 Days on Earth, Shut Up And Play The Hits) and What Matters Most, it is a hybrid of documentary, music and art which explores the making of Reflektor. Using personal footage and interviews tracing back to its initial beginnings in Jamaica, to the recording sessions in Montreal and an impromptu gig at a Haitian hotel on the first night of carnival, the film also takes a peek behind the curtain of their tour, capturing footage from their arena dates in Los Angeles and London.
Arcade Fire said of the film: “There were parts of the Reflektor tour where I think we, Arcade Fire, came the closest in our careers to putting on stage what we imagined in our heads. We were insanely lucky to have Kahlil Joseph documenting from the very beginning.”
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.
Montreal’s strange indie-pop trio The Unicorns abruptly split in 2005, two years after releasing the shambolic but strangely brilliant ‘Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone?’, their first and only album. The band reformed briefly last year for a short tour, including support slots for Arcade Fire, but this five-track EP sees frontman Alden Penner who has sporadically released solo work since the breakup shift his focus back to solo matters. Inspired by Dutch nonprofit organisation Mars One, which aims to see humans establish a colony on the red planet by 2027, ‘Canada In Space’ is wonderfully idiosyncratic. In particular, the sprawling and jarring ‘Meditate’ which features Juno actor and musician Michael Cera on backing vocals may be the best thing Alden Penner’s done outside of The Unicorns.
The Fat Angel Sings 