Search - Julie Doiron, Wooden Stars :: Julie Doiron & The Wooden Stars

Please turn off your dance music / please go to bed now

j.r. | brooklyn | 06/03/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"if you are reading this in the united states please consider joining the small and intense group of americans who know how wonderful julie dorion is. she came to be a name in canada in the early and mid 90s with the rock band eric's trip but folk and lo-fi people will prefer her solo albums to ET's fuzzier indie rock sound. fans of sufjan stevens (though he's more built up and organized), or karla shickle from Ida will like her. and she's got some of that art-of-deadpan vocal sound that cat power has, some of the time, but then the band will pick up, and a beautiful minor harmony gets thrown in.



everything is minimalist on this record, down to the incompleted ideas in the lyrics. "after tomorrow i will be a different woman / won't you give me one more drink? / after tonight? / after tonight? / wouldn't it be nice..." the record's unrefined production camoflages how actually complex her vocal melodies are. this is what makes the great track "Dance Music" both effervescent and interesting. you think that's a breezy little song, but try singing it! she's a bass player, and has the interesting melody line thing of good bass playing singers. On the brief occasions she employs the band full blast they get up and clunk and jangle like the robot walking down a spaceship gangplank; she uses them as a blunt instrument. in a good way. i call it awkward rock. and there are a lot of spinning cirular bits fingerpicked on the electric guitar, adding to the album's general dream or underwater quality: you can hear this on the "Drums & Horns" sample above, though it's hard to get a feel for this record from the bits made available there.



a perfect after-bad-party record, late night essay-writing album, pot smoking album, makeout record. recommended for those new to julie dorion. i was more impressed with it than with her newer one. after this you might want to try Broken Girl, which came out a number of years before."