by David Wilikofsky
Genre is, by and large, a convenient framework to use when talking about music. If I say a piece of music is “ambient music” or “rock music”, you immediately have a general idea of what to expect. This makes genre a decent way to talk about and describe music to others (one that’s often used in music writing, including on this site), but also one that’s overly reductive. Genre has always been an artificial construct, and the most creative musicians cannot be pigeonholed by a single genre. When I say something is “ambient rock”, what does that actually mean? There are contradictions loaded into that phrase that can’t be resolved without hearing the music. Genre and its limits are topics I’ve been thinking about a lot while listening to Sundry Rock Song Stock, the latest album from the Montreal-based musician Yves Jarvis. It’s an album in which any notion of genre collapses into itself, resulting in a wildly inventive piece of music that manages to still sound familiar and comforting.
This isn’t to say that you can’t pick out different strains of genre within this album if you listen closely. Within opener “Epitome” alone you get a post rock opening, followed by a more straightforward singer-songwriter passage before mutating into undulating instrumentals. The whole album shares this restless spirit, pulling ideas and sounds from a wide variety of places and stitching them together. Beneath everything is a beautiful quiet ambience; sometimes it comes to the fore and takes control of the track, but more often than not it just buzzes beneath the surface. Songs emerge from and fade into that ether seamlessly.
At the same time, all of this genre talk feels almost irrelevant to this album. Every note and transition is so carefully considered and painstakingly engineered that you don’t even notice how many ideas Jarvis has crammed into it. Look no further than how the almost conventional singer-songwriter fare of “For Props” dissolves into the electronic experimentation of “Ambrosia”, or how “Emerald” fades into “Victim”. Each of these transitions feels entirely natural, flowing perfectly into one another despite their sonic differences. This holds true for inter-track and intra-track transitions; even on a track like “Epitome” all the disparate musical ideas contained in its four minute runtime feel like a natural fit together. There’s not a note out of place on the album; it’s music that truly feels organic, almost like a living, breathing entity unto itself.
This is music that sounds like everything and nothing. At times I hear Kurt Vile, at others Joni Mitchell, and still others Inoyama-Land, and that’s just a small fraction of the names that flashed through my head while listening. I highly doubt that Jarvis is trying to reference all (or any) of these things; rather, it’s just a testament to the chameleonic album he has put together, one that simultaneously sounds like all these legendary artists and none of them. Jarvis proves himself a pop auteur on this album, one who can’t be bound to any conventional notions of genre. It’s a beautiful, mercurial album that we’ll be spinning for years to come.