www.quebecantique.com
album on cdbaby (or iTunes)
Listen:
Quebec Antique - "Sleep"
Quebec Antique - "Under White Roofs"
The songs on Quebec Antique's debut The Abbey Tapes certainly don't beg comparison, but they do resound with comfortable elements that ease listeners into their conversation. The sound is much more fluid than that of The Postal Service, but as an electronica record driven by pop elements, the comparison is natural. It's definitely not Sigur Ros, but it has a similar softness and polish to its grandiose approach. And it's really nothing like Explosions in the Sky, but the swimming piano in "Montreal" and the album's sheer evocative power bring even them to mind.
The duo of Quebec Antique experiments with a peculiar juxtaposition of slick programming and quirky organic sounds--banjo, glockenspiel, ukulele, among others. With inspired mixing, masterful ambient noise samples and a bit of clever melodica, the duo takes what could've been another band's sappy piano/guitar single and turns it into an expansive, enveloping tour de force. This is exactly what becomes of "The Sounds," and throughout other songs too Quebec Antique proves they have the deftness to write beyond the expected. It's toyboxy beats on "A Little On The Inside" that seem to redirect the focus in a song about goodbyes toward a playful celebration of the hellos that preceded them. Nothing in the lyrics mentions a sweet backstory, of course, but the listener can feel it in its whimsical rhythms and sunny progression.
Indeed, Quebec Antique's songs seem to be more felt than heard, stretching short and simple moments into the lengthy, suspended emotional uncertainty or bliss at which they're experienced. Simple but vivid lyrics read like vignettes of the everyday--forgetting a dream, looking at the stars. Others are snapshots of more somber realities--abusive relationships, the genocide in Darfur. They are narratives set to breathing, explorations of the fleeting, common passages that give us life.
Quebec Antique, then, seems to breathe underwater, musing in "Sleep," All your thoughts and memories are an ocean made in time. At its heart, The Abbey Tapes explores that expanse of quiet memories and the direction of music itself for what they are--warmly familiar and yet little understood, strange and alien yet sparkling and beautiful, ancient yet ever evolving.