Yves Jarvis

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, 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.”