“I’ve always been a recording artist—I’ve never been a songwriter,” Yves Jarvis says. 

Until now. 

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-Sébastien Yves Audet, returns with an expression of brazen songcraft and pure musicianship: 16 tracks he played himself, without a single additional contributor (“Not even one!”), transforming his acclaimed, three-time-Polaris-longlisted vision into the stuff of verses and choruses, hooks and hits, which vibrates like a cosmic anthropology.

“I basically only listened to Frank Sinatra for a year,” Jarvis tells me. We’re in his kitchen—a motley place arrayed with flowers, candy-canes, a sawed-off half-carton of eggs. Rolling papers, a perfect cup of coffee, a cat. “I wanted Sinatra’s clarity—the way the songs exist without him, as real things. And he’s the interpreter.” Whereas Jarvis had previously approached music as something sculptural—as compositions that emerge spontaneously from raw sonic material—"this time I just made a ton of songs,” he says: “I had tunes stuck in my head. I had choruses. I had actual parts. Instead of making a world, I thought: ‘I’m a band. The drums are there to keep the beat.’”

The goal became to articulate these songs as purely and as simply as possible. At home, in the studio, at subletted apartments in Montreal and L.A.—he’d roll out of bed and get straight to work, plugging his gear into a half-broken laptop. Whereas once he had fetishized analog tape, the idea of “using magnetic dust as a medium,” now Jarvis appreciated the value of working without any such preciousness: much of All Cylinders was recorded on bare-bones Audacity, sans plugins, “no pretense, no self-indulgence, music for the sake of music,” channelling the spirit of Paul McCartney’s II. “I feel like this is the least contrived thing I’ve ever done,” Jarvis declares. Lyrics that matter. Vocals up front, where people will actually hear them. “If something’s true to you,” he explains, “it’s probably true to a million other people.”

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. Artists “shouldn’t forget where they come from!” he tells me—and I assume that he’s referring to geography, influence, canon. No—“You come from now!” he shouts. He is dedicated to a music that condenses folk, R&B, country, blues, Americana—with a touch that’s contemporary, even futuristic. As we sit together, the speaker on top of his fridge is playing all kinds of music. “It’s all the same sh*t,” he says. “They all stem from core things.” Jarvis is an omnivore, and All Cylinders smashes together a stunning array of influences: Serge Gainsbourg, Judee Sill, Sheryl Crow, Captain Beefheart, Jackson Browne, Throbbing Gristle, Ray Charles, Brian Eno, Fleetwood Mac, Panic at the Disco…  All this is distilled into tunes that feel like taking sips from a cup, or drags from a cigarette—vivid and self-contained tunes that are just two or three minutes long. 

The way All Cylinders eases-in is like the ideal beginning or ending for a day. A cymbal hit; an enveloping folk-chorale; then the title track’s easy-going shuffle, a driving-song by way of Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach. “10 and 2 down Highway 3 / I’m headed home / I’m headed east,” Jarvis coos. This is an album with many such road tunes, from “Silver KG”’s dream-kissed chug to “Decision Tree”’s existential fork in the road. While “Off to Honeymoon”’s a wry and jaunty wedding song, “I’m Your Boy” imagines a janky trap- and reggae-informed chanson. “With a Grain” is heavy and also somehow prog—turning a tune about phoniness and performance into one of the wildest compositions in Yves Jarvis’s growing catalogue. 

Throughout, Jarvis says, “it’s not about trying to tell my story, fit in, or achieve any goal”: “it’s about trying to express something I’ve learned: some information I’ve received” down the wire from the divine. The world’s full of love; it’s also full of mystery. Gazing at his cluttered kitchen table, I wonder how often he lights the votive candle–the one that sits beside an empty Red Bull can. All Cylinders seems to shimmer in a middle space, part-real and part-celestial. “Thank God I’m me,” Yves Jarvis murmurs. “It would suck to be anybody else.”

CONTACT

Publicity
Patrick Tilley

Label
In Real Life (WW)

Next Door Records (Canada)

EU/UK Booking Agent
Nikita Lavrinenko