The Guardian Indie

1. One to watch: Annie-Claude Deschênes

   The frontwoman of Montreal punk band Duchess Says goes solo with a synth-pop album that started life in the cutlery drawer…

   For musician and multidisciplinary artist Annie-Claude Deschênes, a planned break from fronting Montreal post-punk types Duchess Says – to have a baby and study permaculture – became much more protracted thanks to the pandemic. Before long, the itch to create something became too strong to ignore. “I create every day, all the time,” she told Canadian French-language newspaper Le Devoir. “I needed a project that I could do myself, without depending on others.”

   That creativity manifested itself in an unusual way: Deschênes started off by recording the noises her cutlery made (“a spoon spinning in a glass, fork and knife punches on aluminium plates”), and from those clanking beginnings she ended up recording a debut solo album of darkly seductive electro-pop, Les Manières de Table. As befits a record that began with forks and spoons, there’s a culinary theme to it: the standout Phones is based around a restaurant reservation phone call, while the title track concerns itself with modern-day table manners. The concept was extended further with Canadian shows last autumn in which Deschênes’s music was complemented by her own experiments in gastronomy. “With this project the show takes the form of a conventional musical live performance merged with restaurant dining,” she explains. “The public will be invited to dine along and dance!”

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2. Claire Rousay: Sentiment review – the sound of life happening elsewhere

   (Thrill Jockey)
   Largely recorded on the road and full of found sounds, this beguiling record from the US ambient artist captures the feeling of self-inflicted solitude

   Sentiment is Claire Rousay’s self-professed pop album, and compared to the abstracted sound collages of earlier works marks a subtle change of pace for the experimental Canadian-American artist. “Pop” might seem a stretch, but these are field recordings with a solid emotional centre, the soundtrack of someone unspooling in real time. “It’s 4pm on a Monday and I cannot stop sobbing,” intones guest Theodore Cale Schafer on the opening track – and the stage is set.

   Rousay’s own vocal is soft but robotic, like raw emotion fed through a machine. Much of Sentiment took shape in solitary hotel rooms, and a feeling of confinement lingers while she conducts a mental autopsy of failed interactions, jealousies and self-inflicted solitude. Lover’s Spit Plays in the Background is “an apology song” for driving others away, set to twinkling midwestern guitar.
   
   Emo? Probably. But there are no cathartic singalongs in the album’s downbeat cello or swelling drones. Its relatability stems from somehow managing to recreate the specific texture of loneliness: conversations just out of earshot in W Sunset Blvd; the scattered birdsong and faint car horns of Sycamore Skylight, suggesting hours ticking by while you stare at a ceiling. These fragments of sound might be snatched from everyday moments, but drive home the feeling that life must be happening elsewhere.

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3. Fontaines DC: ‘We can generate ideas that sound like they’ve been carved in stone for a thousand years’

   Influenced by Korn and moving beyond their native Ireland, the band are ready to be one of the biggest in the world. They explain how panic attacks and parenthood came to bear on a bold new LP

   Carlos O’Connell isn’t merely excited about the release of Fontaines DC’s new single. He’s “giddy for it. I’m giddy,” he emphasises, reclining in his dressing gown in a sunlit corner of his north London home. His attire is far from rock star loucheness: it’s 9am and the guitarist has already been up for hours with his one-year-old daughter. “There’s no time to get ready!” His effusiveness doesn’t feel like a stretch: the prospect of any new material from the celebrated Dublin band is thrilling enough; the fact that Starburster marks a wholly unexpected sidestep into antic, irreverent, Korn-inspired nu-metal is enough to make any interested parties come over slightly light-headed.

   Yet later that afternoon, Fontaines frontman Grian Chatten is finding it difficult to muster the same enthusiasm. Perhaps because he can’t quite bring himself to listen to the thing – or, in fact, any of the band’s forthcoming fourth album, Romance. He tells me this from a more stereotypical hot seat, a characterfully cluttered old-school pub in Camden Town, although he’s not cleaving to rock cliche, either. We are on the Diet Cokes and the only pharmaceuticals around are his ADHD medication, which he remembers to take halfway through the interview. “Want one?” he offers, snapping the blister pack.

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4. Bodega: Our Brand Could Be Yr Life review – uneven railing against the evils of capitalism

   (Chrysalis)
   The New York indie-rockers retool early work into an eclectic set of musings on porn, Tarkovsky and filthy lucre

   Indie quintet Bodega’s third album is sort of their first. It reshapes a 33-track lo-fi collection that precursor outfit Bodega Bay dropped in 2015, railing against capitalism’s baleful effect on everything. There’s now a triptych of songs called Cultural Consumer, where once there were five. Ambitiously, Bodega employ shoegaze, Sub Pop indie, post-punk and college rock for their vignettes about corporate-minded youth culture. Results vary.

   Waving a mighty sword of observation is fine but without tempering it in the hot fire of analysis – how did we get here? Where do we go next? – your attack will always be weaker. Bodega Bait or ATM don’t bring anything to the kids v commerce discourse that you couldn’t get from a jpeg of Nirvana’s Nevermind.

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5. Jess Ribeiro: Summer of Love review – a balm for anxious times

   With expansive, experimental instrumentation, the Melbourne musician’s fourth album records our contemporary chaos – and finds a glimmer of hope

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   Jess Ribeiro has range. Over the last decade, the Melbourne singer-songwriter has flitted from gentle storytelling to something a little weirder and more experimental. There was the folksy world of her debut, 2012’s My Little River; her following two albums added more texture and reverb, and a bit of jangle to boot. Central to it all is Ribeiro’s voice, which conveys worlds of emotion through its unadorned honesty.

   Straddling these two modes, Summer of Love is Ribeiro’s first album in half a decade. Its carefree title belies its often sombre lyricism, relaying Ribeiro’s ennui in the face of modern life.

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