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Myriam Gendron’s music is not easy to write about. She doesn’t rely on fireworks. Her singing and guitar playing is entirely devoid of gimmick. There are no cheap tricks, no bones thrown to the too-casual listener, but neither does she draw you in with difficulty or with discordance. Her third album, Mayday, doesn’t seek to create a single, definitive mood, or peddle a unifying theme. And yet moods and themes, difficulties and discordances, do emerge. She trades in subtleties: the nuanced play between traditional music and original songwriting, the differences and similarities between the French and English languages, the lightness of touch that illuminates – softly and from the inside – songs about grief or joy.
Some of this subtlety comes from Gendron’s propensity to slip between languages (she is based in Montreal, that most polyglot of cities, and spent a spell busking in Paris). Songs with simple, universal messages can take on the focus of dreams when heard in an unfamiliar language. But this doesn’t wholly explain the elusive appeal of Mayday. For instance, the opening track, There Is No East Or West, is a solo guitar instrumental. It is a slow, soulful, meandering piece, foregoing showy virtuosity in favour of – what exactly? – an innate sense of timing, perhaps, or a kind of musical generosity. Maybe Gendron has a unique insight into the psychological or psychic implications of music. Either way, it is a quietly moving piece, deceptively substantial in its emotional scope.
Long Way Home sees her utilise a laid-back synthesis of electric and acoustic instrumentation, augmented by Jim White’s ever-reliable drumming. It has some of the appeal of classic folky songwriters like Sandy Denny, but with a near-imperceptible edge of experimentation: the guest musician Marisa Anderson’s electric guitar seems at times to float free of the melody and the percussive clatter leads the song gently into avant-folk-rock territory. Anderson again plays a prominent role on the highly evocative Terres Brûlées, on which a timeless, brooding melody partly conceals a backdrop of sonic experimentation. It has the feel of a post-apocalyptic hymn.
A kind of fugitive melancholy, like an ambiguous sister of grief, flits into many of Mayday’s songs, maybe because Gendron recorded the album in the period immediately after the death of her mother. The feeling is there in the gentle Dorothy’s Blues, a lullaby-like exploration of loss and endings and the passing of time inspired, like much of Gendron’s earlier work, by the poetry of Dorothy Parker. It’s there in the disarming simplicity of Look Down That Lonesome Road, where Gendron’s voice is at its most moving. But this melancholy often has bright edges, as on the shimmering instrumental La Luz.
Gendron has a knack for letting a song unfold at just the right pace. In the traditional La Belle Françoise, every note seems to fall into place naturally so that the song, which is almost seven minutes long, seems to pass by in no time at all. Lully Lullay – an Appalachian variant of the Coventry Carol – feels strangely modern, White’s intuitive drumming forming a destabilised and decentred backdrop for the old melody. She can do straight-up prettiness too – see the soft, springy melody of Quand J’étais Jeune et Belle – but it is always undercut by some intangible sense of otherness. Berceuse, the achingly beautiful lullaby that closes the album, is home to an electric guitar melody which is familiar but just beyond the grasp of memory. The refrain ‘tout va bien’ is called up from a realm somewhere between hope and sadness, and the icing on the cake is a brilliant and wholly unexpected sax solo from Zoh Amba. It knocks us off-kilter, makes us question everything that has gone before.
And it pays to think about everything that has gone before because Mayday is an album that, for all its lightness, demands time and benefits from deep listening. Myriam Gendron’s art, for all its surface simplicity, harbours a wealth of emotional and aesthetic complexities which, when taken together, form a wholly unique sound. Mayday is the most moving and persuasive example of that sound to date.
Mayday is released on 10th May 2024 on Thrill Jockey Records/Feeding Tube.
Order: https://myriamgendron.komi.io/
Myriam Gendron Tour Dates
Mar. 22 – Knoxville, TN – Big Ears Festival
Apr. 2 – Minneapolis, MN – The Cedar
Apr. 4 – Rock Island, IL – Rozz Tox
Apr. 5 – Milwaukee, WI – Wilson Center
Apr. 6 – Chicago, IL – Judson & Moore
Apr. 26 – Williamstown, MA – Clark Art Institute
May 16 – New York, NY – Le Poisson Rouge *
May 17 – Keene, NH – Thing in the Spring *
May18 – Montréal, QC – Lion d’Or *
May 20 – Portland, OR – Holocene *
May 22 – Seattle, WA – Rabbit Box *
May 23 – Vancouver, BC – St. James Community Square *
May 24 – San Diego, CA – The Loft *
May 25 – Los Angeles, CA – Zebulon *
May 26 – Mill Valley, CA – Sweetwater Music Hall *
Jun. 28 – Toronto, ON – Danforth Music Hall ^
- w/ Jim White & Marisa Anderson (duo)
^ w/ Kurt Vile & the Violators
