Myriam Gendron

★★★★

Ma Délire – Songs Of Love, Lost & Found FEEDING TUBE. CD/DL/LP

Montreal artist’s longawaited second set of French and English traditional music. Myriam Gendron’s debut LP, 2014’s Not So Deep As A Well, reworked the poems of New York satirist Dorothy Parker into delicately complex works of voice and guitar that had the haunted DIY whisper of Sibylle Baier and the gauche ethereal innocence of Moe Tucker. With this follow-up she’s taken Quebecois folk songs, removed their Catholic imagery, pulling out their romantic longing. Expanding on the first album’s guitar-and-vocals skeleton, Gendron adds clarinet, Moog, and harmonium, plus electric guitar atmospherics from Bill Nace and percussion by Chris Corsano. Singing with greater range and depth, Gendron creates a Quebecois folk LP of light and shade that inhabits beauty and heartbreak, secular power and emotional complexity, an album that grows with every play, from merely great to something spectacular.