Features

Julie Doiron’s lexicon of erstwhile outfits and musical unions may read like an indie super-directory – Okkervil River, Herman Düne, The Tragically Hip, Eric’s Trip, Mt Eerie, Wooden Stars and more – but the Canadian melodist’s solo endeavours are equally stellar. On latest missive I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day, new on Jagjaguwar, Doiron dons the cap of clattering pop doyenne; lifts her spirits to the heavens; gets her rock on.

“My goal is to feel better by the end of the song,” she says. But how does she get there?
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Photography: Lyndsy Welgos

‘The First Two Weeks’, the debut EP from New York’s Blank Dogs, landed on Freedom School Records back in 2007: a blurred and murky cut of defiantly DIY post-punk, veiled in intent, but strangely addictive in its cowebbed mystery. Then there was another record; then another; then another. In fact, a great string of music, seven-inches and twelve-inches, cassettes and CDs, cropping up bearing the stamp of one of a dozen or so US indie labels – the likes of Sweet Rot, Sacred Bones, HoZac, and Fuck It Tapes – sometimes before you’d even had time to properly digest the last. Each one was played and recorded in the same blurry brut punk style, the surrounding ephemera bearing visual signatures: primitively-drawn faces of men or gargoyles, African masks, a couple of circulated press photos of a man with face hidden by sheets or blankets.
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There’s this moment – over acoustic guitars, sparse beats, voice cracking and vulnerable, the occasional flash of softened violin – in ‘Speech Therapy’: “This is my speech therapy/This ain’t rap,” she whispers, adding almost as after-thought an self-affirming “yeah” so gentle you wonder if you imagined it first time round. But no, there it is again: “This is my speech therapy/This ain’t rap (yeah),”, violins near-unbearably sweet now, her voice on the verge of tears, turned inward. “I just want to be loved/And it takes a lot to say that,” she pleads, violin promising unattainable salvation, guitar intricate and already there.
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A quick digital bounce through the world of French indie purveyors Le Vilain Chien feels – and looks – like the dream projection of a sugar-tripping six-year-old at a birthday party: rainbow-coloured glucose/vomit burps, happy dancing friends, wilfully tuneless singalongs over musical chairs electrobeats, puppies and pussycats (“Cats and dogs are a lot of fun to us, especially when they’re ugly”) all come looming out of a void coloured in the bright blues and pinks of synthesised candy.
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