Lydia Persaud, Gus Englehorn, and Dirty Eddy
Lydia Persaud
Moody31 // Next Door Records
Lydia Persaud’s new LP, Moody31, was released on April 29th via Next Door Records. It comprises eight songs, each essential to the album’s story of security in oneself, vulnerability, heartbreak, and new beginnings. Persaud breaks these themes down and re-forms them again and again, such that their shards refract new light throughout the album. It is a beautiful, concise, and articulate suite of songs.
On numbers like “Think of Me”, Persaud’s songwriting shines. The song is timeless, and the vocal delivery is beautifully restrained. Haunting, Marvin Gaye-esque background vocal arrangements convey a brokenness and heartache that Persaud’s words dance around. “Words for Her” is another winner on Moody31, telling the story of saying ‘I love you’ for the first time in a new romance. “Good For Us”, the first song on the album and its lead single, has a more uptempo feel, but retains the complexity and emotional range reflected in the entire project. It makes a case for taking space for oneself in a relationship: ‘You’ve been on my mind religiously,” she sings, “I’m forgetting who I used to be”.
This is the perfect moody summer album. Persaud marries sounds of Bill Withers, Carole King, and Marvin Gaye with jazz-influenced compositions and melodies to create a soul genre all her own. Although Persaud could carry the album with her vocal mastery alone, Moody31 offers the full package without compromise.
- Sophie Noel
Gus Englehorn
Dungeon Master // Secret City Records
Armed with his signature moppy haircut and charmingly impish grin, Gus Engle makes for quite a striking figure. Joking in an interview that adding the “horn” to his name gave it some gravitas, the Alaskan-raised singer songwriter’s presence is distinct, to say the least: tall and lanky, his demeanor and voice would not sound totally out of place as the host of a children’s TV show from the 90s, perhaps called Gus’ Corner, where makeshift puppets gather around his campfire and sing songs. Crouched within this playful countenance, however, is a subversive and keen writer. Informed by dreams, David Lynch references, and weilding a penchant for the absurd, the pro-snowboarder-turned-outsider-rocker’s latest album Dungeon Master is a boiling cauldron of odd-duck pop hooks run through the surrealist blender, the songs emerging the other side colorfully off-kilter, grotesquely beautiful.
The songs were born in his small home outside of Québec City, where he and his wife Estée Preda live in seclusion. A brilliant artist in her own right, Preda here takes on the role of both his drummer, back up singer, and director of his wonderfully weird music videos. In the video for the lead single “Tarantula,” the dream-like set pieces glow with ultra-saturated lights and crackle with film grain, a viewing experience not unlike (I imagine) attending an elementary school play on acid. It’s a glorious thing, and the song is an unforgettable, instant classic. Its thick, descending guitar riff and boxy rhythmic stomp underscore spare lyrics describing seduction, infestation, succumbing.
This spider silk of paranoia threads its way through the album, casting its nightmarish spell over the bouncy jeu de mots of “Exercise My Demons” and the incantatory vision of “The Gate”. In every instance, Englehorn’s nimble and whimsical vocal stylings shine, embellishing and stuttering out syllables, seemingly spontaneously spouting cryptic rhymes like “I put lipstick on my lips like Heliogabalus.” In the character of Gus Englehorn, he has created a narrator that feels embedded in the story, telling it as it happens. The melody wanders then twists abruptly at the end of a line, the tempo slows, a twinkling xylophone kicks in— it has all the energy of someone making up the story as it goes along, and you have no choice but to be swept up in its tumbling current.
As the eponymous Dungeon Master himself, Englehorn gleefully plunges listeners into a world where the rules bend and shiver, time rolls backwards; the Holy Ghost haunts a suicidal horse in Hell, and the sincerest expression of love comes from the voice of a flea. He has created a universe unto itself, populated by an intoxicating blend of characters that are beaten bloody, preyed upon by spirits, and lost in hallucinatory passages that wind circuitously into madness. But through it all, a warmth and undeniable sense of humor prevails, and for a guide on a trip through this world, at times nightmarish and brutal, I could think of no one better suited for the task than Gus Englehorn.
- Harman Burns
Dirty Eddy
.com // Self-Released
Bringing back some serious 90's memories, the Dirty Eddy EP, .com, logs on to the ol' Microsoft's Windows 3.1 and hits play on some downloaded Napster tunes to relax to. The music floats in after log-in with 6 atmospheric synth-pop ditties that according to Travis Dallyn (Dirty Eddy) pairs well with "cats, synthesizers, motorbikes, and milk".
That actually is the perfect description for the whole vibe of the EP. "The Ooze" (and its short-film-esque video) is a synthy instrumental joyride around the colourful backalleys and neighborhoods of Edmonton (where Travis/Dirty Eddy hails from). Along for the ride is the aforementioned cat, motorbikes and a deep, deep love for milk.
My personal fav of the EP, "The Neighbour", showcases Travis' vocals and lovely harmonies from Catlin W Kyzyk, who plays drums, mixed and mastered the EP at his studio, Sublet Sound.
Breathy, synthy, art-pop with an upbeat energy that brings me back to more innocent days where I would cruise the mean streets of Dirt City/Edmonton myself, on my friends moped, get a local headbanger to buy us smokes and a Big Bear, and go hide in the woods to drink and smoke until we literally puked. Ahhhh, the good ol' days.
- Mo Lawrance
