Selective Listening | The Press

One hundred thousand tracks are uploaded to listening platforms every day. Our journalists draw your attention to the songs and albums that are getting them excited.

Bewitching

We understand that guitarist Yves Desrosiers succumbed to the voice of Lhasa de Sela the first time he heard her sing in Spanish. His way of biting into words, of making what was in his stomach vibrate and of blowing on the embers of a heartbreaking love had something striking. First Recordingswhich brings together pieces recorded in 1994, when the guitarist and the singer were still learning to dialogue together on a musical level, takes us back to the rawest and most touching aspects of Lhasa’s singing. We inevitably linger on his voice when discovering these dozen songs. However, the spell would not be complete without the equally intense but delicate and very inhabited playing of the guitarist, who discovered himself off the beaten track of rock. Simply magnificent.

Alexandre Vigneault, The Press

World music

First Recordings

Lhasa by Sela and Yves Desrosiers

Audiogram

Like only The Cure can sound

At the heart of this anxiety-inducing era, nothing is more reassuring than learning that Robert Smith has not yet managed to cure his melancholy. He promised it to us and here it is: Aloneher first new song in 16 years, a haunting ode to the end of love, the world and all music, with birds falling from the sky and flying carpets of ethereal keyboards to carry us to safety. Nearly seven minutes during which The Cure sounds like only The Cure can sound, without self-parodying. Songs of a Lost Worldthe entire album? It’s in time for the month of the dead, the 1st^er November, that it must arrive. This is what we call having a sense of timing.

Dominic Tardif, The Press

Gothic rock

Alone

The Cure

Universal Music Canada

An acoustic return for Bon Iver

A new era has just begun for Bon Iver with the release of the first extract (SPEYSIDE) of a new mini-album (SAND). This is Justin Vernon’s first song since 2020, when he released AUATCa piece with gospel tunes, led by the piano and an ultra-modified voice. Total silence afterwards, but then SPEYSIDE comes to us: the piece, acoustic and refined, embellished with a discreet orchestration of strings, lets Vernon’s voice go from its serious and deep tone to his very singular head voice. Described on the singer-songwriter’s website as a letter of apology to certain people the artist loved and hurt, the song moves away from the maximalist prowess of previous albums and dives back into the raw sensibility of Good Iver from the beginning.

Marissa Groguhé, The Press

Folk

SPEYSIDE

Good Iver

Jagjaguwar

The raw truth of Dany Placard

“ I hope every day, quietly I hope “. We feel the time passing in Having known15^e album by Dany Placard which is crossed by solitude and mourning, but also hope. The seasons go by slowly, he can’t wait to find his girlfriend in NB, misses his dog Stormy, his best friend. You have to have written a lot of songs to achieve such truth in simplicity, to be so raw without being miserable, to sing heartbreaking country ballads without losing your humor. “ My boots are getting a little water darling/But I’m not too bad/There are worse things in life than that »: Dany Placard has a sense of detail and the universal, touches us and rocks us, and it feels good.

Josée Lapointe, The Press

Folk

Having known

Dany Placard

Costume Records

Before purgatory

Children’s choir at the opening proclaiming the perdition of Man, while the living and the dead find refuge in The Inn of Sudden Deaths — thank you, Félix Leclerc. For his first steps in solo format, David Bujold, leader of the stoner rock group Fuudge, leaves aside distorted guitars and heavy drums to make way for classical arrangements (violin, viola, piano, etc.). This orchestrated, vaporous, even chamber folk form – think of Harmonium, Elliott Smith and Beck, period Sea Change –, allows us to listen to the texts of this outstanding lyricist, who talks to us about repentance, unconditional love and the beautiful people encountered on the dark path of life. Because before arriving in purgatory, you have to live a little.

Philippe Beauchemin, The Press

Chamber folk

The ground or the sky

David Bujold

FolivoraRecords