"Native Speakers" [Kanine,2011]
This freewheeling Canadian quartet make experimental dream-pop delivered through a shoegaze haze.
Braids plays knotty, pop songs that feel like reimaginings of Cocteau Twins songs spruced up with shimmering female vocals. But oh, those vocals! They make a busy, bustling, almost baroque but always buoyant sound, heavy on depth, texture and intricacy yet somehow light, even poppy – even when their exploratory jams extend to nine minutes.
Braids are a new group of young musicians from Montreal via Calgary in Canada. They have the freewheeling experimental spirit of a New York outfit, but they also remind us of a Canadian collective such as Broken Social Scene, whose lineup includes as many as 19 members. There are only four players in Braids but you'd think there were more. They make a busy, bustling, almost baroque but always buoyant sound, heavy on depth, texture and intricacy yet somehow light, even poppy – even when their exploratory jams extend to nine minutes.Lemonade is the track that has been gaining Braids, formerly the Neighbourhood Council, attention of late. It starts slowly, unravelling steadily, pulsating like a babbling brook, voices laughing to denote the naturalism of it all. Eventually, a pattern emerges, which the musicians proceed to repeat over several minutes, a cyclical motif that is as much like an indie version of "systems music" as it is krautrock or even trance, only trance with a home-made feel played on found objects and a variety of keyboards and non-electronic instruments. Throughout, Raphaelle Standell-Preston maps out a serpentine melody, her voice clear and high, her words deceptively pure ("And what I found is that we're all just sleeping around"). At five minutes it all goes blurry and dreamy, as though My Bloody Valentine had suddenly cut in.
Plath Heart is another song built on repetition, which evolves gradually. Again, it's not "pop" in terms of song structure or even production/arrangement, and yet the succulence and sweetness of the vocals are surely pop. Liver and Tan, like much of what Braids do, is hard to categorise. It features a gentle smattering of tribal-ish drums, while the guitar "riff" (too macho a word, really, given the context) has a mournful tinge and the melody meanders jazzily. Is it ambient folk with a rocky urgency? Dream-pop delivered through a shoegaze haze? Perhaps it's progressive pop. Whatever it is, it requires patience but promises ample rewards.
