All Cylinders is Yves Jarvis at full tilt: 11 tracks of lush, self-made songwriting on vinyl. Fusing folk, R&B, country & cosmic pop.

Name: Yves Jarvis - All Cylinders (LP)
SKU: OTJH41580872230
Availability: InStock

Make ready and say ‘ah’ to All Cylinders–the golden, textured new album by one of Montreal’s most original musicians. Yves Jarvis, aka Jean-Sbastien Yves Audet, is no longer simply a recording artist: now, he says, he’s a songwriter. These 11 tracks of brazen songcraft and pure musicianship are things he played himself, without a single additional contributor (‘Not even one!’), and see the 3X-Polaris-nominated artist turn with pleasure to the stuff of verses, choruses, hooks and hits.

‘I basically only listened to Frank Sinatra for a year,’ Jarvis says. He wanted Sinatra’s ‘clarity’–‘the way the songs exist without him, as real things.’ Whereas the 28-year-old previously approached music as something sculptural, ‘this time I just made a ton of songs,’ working with an old laptop and bare-bones software, ‘no pretense.’ ‘Instead of making a world, I thought: ‘I’m a band. The drums are there to keep the beat.”

As always, Yves Jarvis is distinguished by his sound–a warm, vivid thing that feels at once like a handknit piece of fabric and a sheet of precious metal. He is dedicated to a music that condenses folk, R&B, country, blues, Americana–with a touch that’s contemporary, even futuristic, and smashes together a stunning array of influences, from Serge Gainsbourg and Judee Sill to Ray Charles, Brian Eno and Throbbing Gristle. Tunes like ‘Silver KG’ and the title track are iridescent road songs; at other moments Jarvis meditates on truth, fiction and the utterly cosmic. Throughout, All Cylinders seems to shimmer in a middle space, part-real and part-celestial. The world’s full of love; it’s also full of mystery. ‘Thank God I’m me,’ Yves Jarvis admits. ‘It would suck to be anybody else.’