All Cylinders [LP]

Yves Jarvis - All Cylinders [LP]

2025 POLARIS MUSIC PRIZE WINNER - ALBUM OF THE YEAR - YVES JARVIS "ALL CYLINDERS"

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-Sebastien Yves Audet, is no longer simply a recording artist: now, he says, he's a songwriter. These 16 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." 

- Sean Michaels, fall 2024.

A1. With A Grain A2. Gold Filigree A3. One Gripe A4. Decision Tree A5. I've Been Mean A6. I'm Your Boy A7. Warp And Woof B1. All Cylinders B2. The Knife In Me B3. Patina B4. Luck's Last Luster B5. Silver KG B6. Off to Honeymoon B7. Man In His Pomp B8. Chalk It Up B9. Time To Behave