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Myriam Gendron, “Mayday” (Thrill Jockey/Feeding Tube, 2024)

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Despite her slim discography, Montreal-based Myriam Gendron has quietly amassed a very passionate following over the last few years, which is quite an impressive feat given that she frequently sings in French and the bulk of her previous oeuvre was devoted to interpretations of French/Québécois traditional music or Dorothy Parker poems. Obviously, such fare is quite far from the zeitgeist of the present time, but that is a big part of Gendron’s allure: her work taps into a deeper and more timeless vein that captures the joy and pain of being alive in an unusually profound and direct way. Those same themes unsurprisingly remain central on Mayday (it was assembled in the wake of her mother’s passing), but this third album is Gendron’s first to focus primarily on her own original compositions as well as her first release to be professionally recorded in an actual studio. To celebrate that auspicious occasion, Gendron is joined by a host of talented collaborators like Dirty Three’s Jim White, Body/Head’s Bill Nace, and Marisa Anderson. Characteristically, the result is yet another absolutely mesmerizing Myriam Gendron album.

Every single Myriam Gendron album to date has included at least one achingly gorgeous and perfect song (Not So Deep As A Well‘s “Recurrence,” Ma Délire‘s “Go Away From My Window,” etc.) and that trend happily continues here. In fact, Mayday actually features TWO such emotional gut punches. The first is “Long Way Home,” which calls to mind a great lost ’70s folk rock gem by someone like John Martyn. As always, I love Gendron’s sad, low voice as well as her lyrics and her simple, unpretentious approach to melody, but this one simply has one heartbreaking line after another. Despite that, the piece still feels wonderfully bittersweet and uplifting due to its arrangement, as Gendron is joined by Marisa Anderson on lead guitar and Jim White on drums to balance the song’s deep sadness with rolling and swaying folk rock magic. That “full band” approach is the ideal setting for such a poignant, quietly heavy piece, which is an unexpected evolution of sorts: I have long believed that Gendron’s most beautiful songs would work every bit as well with no instrumental accompaniment at all (like all the best folk/traditional music), but Mayday features a handful of pieces in which well-placed guest appearances launch an already hauntingly beautiful song to another level altogether.

The best example of that phenomenon is the album’s other stone-cold masterpiece, “Lully Lullay,” which is the repurposed Appalachian version of a 15th century Christmas song (“Coventry Carol,” which is generally regarded to be the darkest Christmas carol of all time). Instead of singing about King Herod’s massacre of children, however, Gendron transforms the piece into a moving farewell to her mother, but the even bigger twist is that she tagged in Jim White for a wild free drumming catharsis (“I wanted something very violent, like a storm”). Dropping a wild drum solo in the middle of an ancient Christmas carol was definitely not something I ever expected Gendron to do and I very much love this new penchant for bold and visceral surprises.

Notably, there is yet another “holy shit-where did THAT come from?!?” moment lurking at the end of the album in “Berceuse,” as Gendron invited saxophonist Zoh Amba to try her hand at whipping up a howling tornado (which she does brilliantly). Amusingly, the piece in question is actually a lullabye and one that Gendron thought was already finished, but she was inspired by the dramatic weather unfolding outside her home while she was writing about the piece for an Alan Lomax Digital Archive exhibit. I must say that it was hugely life-affirming to go into this album expecting a fresh batch of sublimely beautiful folk songs only to be blown out of my chair by fiery free jazz eruptions tearing through Christmas carols and lullabies. Gendron has mentioned in the past that she feels more at home in avant-garde circles than in folk/traditional music scenes and I now completely understand why: this is folk music with some legitimately sharp teeth.

The album is rounded out by a pair of acoustic instrumentals (“There Is No East Or West” and “La Luz”), a Gene Austin cover (“Look Down That Lonesome Road”), and a handful of bilingual or French originals. While I am quite fond of “Dorothy’s Blues,” the French songs did not resonate quite as deeply with me, which makes perfect sense, as my meager French skills prevent me from appreciating the beauty of Gendron’s lyrics and reduce those pieces to a purely melodic experience. That is not a grievance so much as it is a testament to Gendron’s gifts as a lyricist, however (even with covers and folk songs, as she is not shy about paring away bits that dilute or distract from their soulful essence). Much like Leonard Cohen (whose songs she used to play while busking in the Paris metro), Gendron seems like she is primarily a poet at heart.

The resemblance to Cohen does not end there, however, as Gendron has a similar intuitive gift for transforming her words into something almost transcendent through her choice of melodies and some simple acoustic guitar accompaniment. When she hits the mark, the directness, vulnerability, and intimacy of her songs hit with a power that no amount of clever arranging, technical virtuosity, or studio magic can ever hope to replicate. That is what I went into Mayday expecting: honest songs about the heartache and beauty of life undiluted by artifice or studio polish. I was not disappointed in that regard at all, but the sheer intensity and unexpectedness of some of the wilder instrumental passages was a revelatory addition to an already wonderful vision. That new layer bodes very well for the future, as truly great songs are like pearls or diamonds: they only appear under the right conditions and it can take a long time for them to reach their final shape, but an artist can still make one hell of an album if a handful of such gems is interspersed with a talented cast of musicians unleashing pure fire. In the case of “Lully Lullay,” those two things collide in the same song to emphatically remind me exactly why Myriam Gendron is one of my favorite artists on the planet right now.

Listen here.

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Big Blood, “First Aid Kit” (Ba Da Bing/Feeding Tube, 2023)

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This latest LP from Big Blood is their first for Ba Da Bing and a spiritual successor of sorts to Do You Want to Have a Skeleton Dream?, as the band are back in “full family trio retro-pop extravaganza” mode. For the most part, Quinnissa (who was apparently only 13 when this album was recorded) handles the lead vocals for a series of hooky, bass-driven garage rock nuggets, though there are also a couple of headier Colleen-sung gems for fans of the band’s darker, more psychedelic side. Notably, Caleb’s frayed yelp is entirely absent from the proceedings, but it probably would have felt out of place among the unabashed throwback pop fare. Moreover, First Aid Kit feels like a full-on Quinnissa showcase, which makes for a rather unique entry in the Big Blood canon, as she is one hell of a belter and also spontaneously improvised all her lyrics during recordings. As Caleb notes in the album description, being in a band with your teenage daughter is admittedly something of a messy and volatile situation (“lots of practices end with her being tossed from the band”), but I can see why they are sticking with this format, as Quinnissa increasingly feels like a pop supernova in its formative stages.

This album’s overall feel is something akin to a raucous wedding reception in which members of The Cramps and B-52’s join forces for a spirited and spontaneous set of half-remembered ’60s bubblegum pop covers. The opening “In My Head” represents that vein in its purest form, as it is built from little more than a meaty bass line, a simple thumping beat, and a subtly surf-damaged guitar tone. The most perfect iteration of that aesthetic comes much later on the album, as “1000 Times” feels like a raw and raucous cover of an imagined classic by someone like The Ronettes. Elsewhere, the dark paranoia of “Never Ending Nightmare” is yet another notable Quinnissa showcase, though its unsettling subject matter is nicely invigorated by a bouncy bassline, quirky percussion, and a killer chorus hook. Quinnissa also handles lead vocals on “Infinite Space,” but that piece feels like a comparative anomaly more akin to Big Blood’s non-Quinnissa fare. It still feels a bit unusually anthemic and driving for a Big Blood song, but reaching infinitely to space is a more traditional lyrical theme for the band and there are some very cool howling psych touches in the periphery. Admittedly, a lot of Quinnissa’s lyrics sound like they were composed by a 13-year-old, but as the album’s description insightfully observes, “teenage impulses fit right in with the band’s intent, which is making music that’s honest, inclusive and flawed.” To their everlasting credit, Big Blood seem to be endlessly resourceful in their balancing of flawed spontaneity and thoughtful art, as Mulkerin harvests “the ghostly presence of past takes” as a subtly trippy background layer throughout the album.

To my ears, the strongest pieces on the album are “Ring Telephone Ring” and “Makes Me Wonder.” The former is a Barbara Lynn cover transformed into a smoldering, psych-damaged slab of country heartache and beautifully continues Big Blood’s near-unbroken run of perfectly chosen and brilliantly executed homages to their favorite songs. It is also a prime example of this album’s unusually nuanced approach to psychedelia, as Colleen’s sensuous vocals leave a ghostly haze of harmonies in their wake. Similarly weighty is “Makes Me Wonder,” which is dedicated to Ma’kihia Bryant, an Ohio 16-year-old murdered by a cop. Given its dark inspiration, it is unsurprisingly a fiery piece, but it is also a wonderfully driving and lushly psychedelic one, as Mulkerin allows himself to go a bit wild on the production side, resulting in a swirling feast of harmonized Siren-esque vocals, field recordings, sound collage elements, and dreamy synths (courtesy of guest Chris Livengood). It almost feels like it could be a stomping, muscular Kate Bush cover that plunges into a gently lysergic rabbit hole, as the gorgeous chorus hypnotically repeats as the piece descends deeper into hazy trippiness. The closing comedown “Weird Road Pt. 1” offers yet another throwback to more traditional Big Blood fare, as it is a Colleen-sung reverie that seems like it is built from little more than harmonium drones and a lazily swooping synth melody (though the buried ghostly vocal layers add a wonderfully hallucinatory touch).

As far as album-length Big Blood statements are concerned, I would personally categorize First Aid Kit as a fun (if uneven) detour rather than a fresh classic, but the album’s reception thus far indicates that I am in the minority on that. I suppose it all depends on which side of Big Blood one prefers: the fun, spontaneous and punchy side or out-of-body transcendence of songs like “Destin Rain.” For those of us in the latter camp, First Aid Kit will probably never be in heavy rotation as much as some other Big Blood albums, but “Ring Telephone Ring” and “Makes Me Wonder” would certainly earn a place on the imaginary self-curated greatest hits retrospective in my head.

Listen here.

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Big Blood, “Radio Valkyrie 1905-1917” (Feeding Tube/Dontrustheruin, 2013)

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Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin have been responsible for some of my favorite music for years, but Big Blood is a significantly weirder, more unpredictable, and prickly entity than the duo’s previous outlet, Fire on Fire. While they are almost always compelling and distinctive, Big Blood’s voluminous output, occasional shrillness, general inscrutability, and stylistic variability can make them a hard band to fully embrace. Fortunately, this gorgeous double LP captures captures Colleen and Caleb at their absolute best, occupying the bizarre, lonely nexus where Appalachian folk, ritual, sound art, vintage Egyptian pop, and deep psychedelia intersect.

This seems to be loose concept album of sorts, as the title and many of the songs make allusions to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian classic We, a novel that I have embarrassingly not yet read. Fortunately, my egregious literary ignorance does not inhibit my enjoyment of this effort at all, aside from perhaps making an already cryptic, arcane album slightly more so. Possible deeper meaning aside, Radio Valkyrie certainly sounds a lot like an otherworldly, late-night radio transmission, which is both thematically appropriate and eerily evocative. 

In some cases, that resemblance is quite overt, as swooping shortwave radio-like feedback appears in several songs (most prominently in “Into the Wild, Part I”) and there are a few ominous, tinny interludes on the first record that sound like a distant, distorted signal pregnant with menace. In other cases, the effect is achieved more subtly, as these songs all share a deeply hallucinatory, nocturnal feel.

Stylistically, however, Radio Valkyrie is all over the map, as the sole constant thread seems to be Colleen Kinsella’s ragged, unusual vocals (usually heard though a thin haze of static or distortion). As much as I enjoy Caleb’s own unique vocals (sort of a strangled hillbilly yelp), it is fitting that only Colleen sings here, as her Siren-esque, force-of-nature vocals are ideally suited for such a hazily unearthly suite of songs. Or, more accurately, “songs.” Despite being a double album, there are very few conventionally structured songs here, particularly on the second album: Radio Valkyrie leans very heavily on abstract collages and droning soundscapes. Fortunately, the few songs that do appear are almost invariably excellent and the surrounding instrumental interludes are so effectively moody and surreal that they could easily carry an album on their own.

The best pieces, of course, are the ones that sound like absolutely no one else. The most striking of those is probably “Sanati,” which seems to be a Layla Murad (or Leila Mourad) cover of sorts, though translations vary and I cannot read Arabic well enough to confirm that (or at all, actually). Regardless, I am sure it sounds nothing like the original, as this version is built upon little more than hollow, funeral procession percussion, a haze of uneasy feedback, and Kinsella’s possessed-sounding wails and chants. “Sirens Knell, Part II,” for its part, is even more brilliantly warped, sounding like an unholy collision of torch song; eerily dissonant Natural Snow Buildings-style flutes; backwards, wrong-sounding guitars; and a malfunctioning gramophone.

Of course, Radio Valkyrie is not without its flaws, but this is probably as close to a perfect album as anyone could expect from Big Blood and the “flaws” in question are mostly relative. For example, the opening “40 Days and 40 Nights” would probably be a highlight on any other album, but sounds too conventionally “Big Blood” to fit on such an otherwise ambitiously mind-bending effort as this one. 

I had a similar issue with the somewhat shrill sludge rock of “Everything is Improving.” It is not necessarily weak, but this is just not the ideal place for a stomping “rock” song with snarling wah-wah guitar. Conversely, however, there is absolutely no filler to be found anywhere and the two records are otherwise thoroughly unique, wonderful, coherent, immersive, complex, haunted-sounding, and totally brain-melting, which renders any minor wobbles fairly irrelevant. This is the album I have been waiting for from Caleb and Colleen: Radio Valkyrie is Big Blood’s masterpiece.

Listen here.