Lost Voices (LP)

Montréal chamber rock ensemble Esmerine return with the new full-length album Lost Voices, the most dynamic and incendiary record of the group's career, following its highly-acclaimed and Juno award-winning 2013 release Dalmak. Led by co-founders Bruce Cawdron (Godspeed You! Black Emperor) on various mallet instruments and Rebecca Foon (Thee Silver Mt. Zion, Saltland) on cello, Esmerine also includes drummer/percussionist Jamie Thompson (The Unicorns, Islands, Little Scream) and multi-instrumentalist Brian Sanderson.

Lost Voices can fairly be called Esmerine's "rock" album, expanding upon the band's celebrated prowess at deploying structure and dynamic, balancing melodic expression against methodical restraint through a diversity of stylistic touchstones (minimalism, post-rock, math-rock, desert rock) while allowing for explosive crescendos of exuberant density and maximalism that most notably distinguishes this record from previous work. The album nonetheless includes several instances of more spacious, searching and/or tender compositions - not only in some of the opening sections of the rock songs, but in stand-alone marimba-and-string-led pieces like "Pas Trop Pas Tropes" and "My Mamma Pinned A Rose On Me" and in the two piano-and-string minuets that close each side of the record.

Lost Voices is a deeply satisfying and evocative journey and another brilliant iteration of Esmerine's distinctive instrumental chamber rock; cerebral and visceral, controlled and volatile, and wholly cinematic in scope throughout.