by Dan Goldin (@paintingwithdan)
Hélène Barbier has an incredible knack for contorting the lines between complex and simple. With a visionary approach to art-pop, her arrangements often take the path less explored, warping her minimalist pop designs to bring new ideas to familiar territory. The effect is instantly refreshing as melodies pop and stick in vivid colors while progressions peel away with subtle nuance. Four years after the release of Barbier’s great second album, Regulus, the Montreal based musician returns with new album Panorama, due out November 14th via Bonsound (Annie-Claude Deschênes, Population II, Laurence-Anne), a record bursting with cosmic beauty and tangled clarity. Throughout the record, Barbier and her collaborators (which include members of Retail Simps, Corridor, Ada Léa and Meg Duffy of Hand Habits among others) deftly move been hypnotic repetition, off-kilter rhythms, reshaped lounge jazz, distorted space-age funk, and woozy melodies that pull it all together in the most astounding of ways.
“Lapin” is the record’s lead single, tightly wrapped around an alien groove that slinks and squiggles under Barbier’s warm bass and the Samuel Gougoux’s drumming. Dreamy, kaleidoscopic, and triumphantly bent while retaining it’s pop splendor, the track brings to mind both Melody’s Echo Chamber and Television, but the sinewy psych ballad is every bit Hélène Barbier’s own creation, a touchstone of light shifts and spirals of layered melody that warble from Ben Lalonde’s detached guitars and Mélanie Venditti’s haunting theremin. Together the whole thing weaves with gorgeous disorientation, pulling us in like a glimpse into the unknown.