(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Eric's Trip were a pivotal band in the renewal of the Canadian scene in the 1990s and also a hotbed of talent. Their style, melodic yet "noisy," aligns with the American noise-rock of that era.
Hailing from the Canadian province of New Brunswick, the band included Julie Doiron (bass) and Rick White (vocals) and debuted with a couple of home recordings. The self-titled EP (Nim, 1992) unveiled the first gems of distorted power-pop (Belong, Red Haired Girl, and especially Mirror). On their second EP, Peter (Murder), even more dreamlike melodies stand out in Deeper, Tangles, and especially Listen and Need. The quality remained amateurish even on the third EP, Songs About Chris (SubPop), with Hurt and some repetition, prompting comparisons to Dinosaur Jr and Sebadoh.
Their progression toward maturity culminates in the album Love Tara (SubPop, 1993), which confirms their inclination for melodic ballads, suitably distorted by guitars, while also revealing a strong influence from Lou Reeds hallucinatory lullabies. Its an album full of surprises: timidly echoing Neil Young in Behind The Garage, chanting a fairy-tale psalm a`
la
Nico
in Secret For Julie, and imitating the grotesque "roots-rock" of the
Violent Femmes
in Spring. Not everything is sweet and tenderindeed, the exuberant power-pop of Anytime You Want and the blazing boogie of Follow place them at their loudest extreme.
At the other end of their artistic spectrum lies the minimal folk of June and To Know Them, tiny and delicate, but perhaps their most experimental arrangements, reaching the limits of pure whispering in Stove, the pinnacle of their humble, domestic music, arranged sparingly and primitively, yet always catchy and sprinkled with some background "noise." In all cases, at both extremes (too cautious or too noisy), Eric's Trip never abandons melody, which remains the structural backbone, even before all the arrangement flourishes.
Eric's Trip found a uniquely schizophrenic way to express the anxieties of their time, effortlessly transitioning from wild, raw violence in Blinded to a tender acoustic ballad like Allergic To Love. No track is superfluous, none is banal, and none repeats.
This is one of the most mature, courageous, and sensitive works of the year, independent of any trends, as only the most isolated Canadians can often be.
The bands inspired moment was confirmed in 1994 with the single Warm Girl.
Their stature, however, was diminished by the subsequent Forever Again (SubPop, 1994), which, apart from another light Lou Reed-style boogie, Girlfriend, a few catchy 60s-style choruses (Always There), and two or three crazy folk tracks a` la Violent Femmes (Cloudy, Hate Song), contains no standout numbers. One thing is primitivism; another is the unfinished, fragmentary, or vague.
Purple Blue (SubPop, 1996) regains some lost ground, thanks to a long Introduction of psychedelic folk and an atmospheric approach that makes the song form almost superfluous. The martial progressions of Hourly and the syncopated pow-wow of Beach turn the arrangement into a purely rhythmic abstraction. On a more traditional front, the thrash of Eyes Shut and the growling boogie of Spaceship Opening add more vigor and substance to their fragile harmonies. Now A Friend and Sun Coming Up are the only links to the power-pop of the past. However, in the lazily psychedelic mood of the album, they feel like even rougher and more disordered sketches.
Long Day's Ride Till Tomorrow (Sappy, 1997) is an anthology of their career.
After the group disbanded, Rick White formed Elevator To Hell, while Julie Doiron embarked on a solo career.
Julie Doiron debuted with Broken Girl (Sappy, 1996) as a hybrid between Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake, accompanying herself solely on acoustic guitar.
Loneliest In The Morning (SubPop, 1997) is another very personal album by Doiron, still in the role of a "lo-fi" chansonnier. Each song is a private conversation exploring a part of her everyday life. While respectful and intimate, confessional tracks like Sorry and Le Soleil offer little in the way of musicality. The EP Will You Still Love Me? (Jagjaguwar) adds another five lullabies.
It was followed by The Wooden Stars (Tree, 1999), which, despite the help of the Canadian band of the same name, seems like an unsuccessful attempt at making post-rock (Gone Gone).
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
Rick White (guitar, vocals and keyboards) and Mark Gaudet (drums) formed a
new trio, the Elevator To Hell, that immediately released two lunatic EPs,
Part One And Two (1994) and Part Three (1996), later collected
on a CD as Parts 1-3 (Subpop, 1996), and a single,
Forward To Snow (Sappy, 1995), recorded live in a snowstorm.
The three EPs may well be the masterpiece of the entire lo-fi pop movement.
Part One showcases a strong sense of melody cast in different settings:
the colloquial Roger And The Hair, the
roaring synth-pop of Why I Didn't Like August 93, the
languid Soft Cell-ian shuffle Everything Made More Sense, the
raunchy country-rock of Three More Weeks, the
burning Velvet Underground-ian boogie Made For You and especially the
sinister Plantation blues Nick Drake-ian melody Rather Be, a masterpiece
of atmosphere and subliminal rhythm.
Part Two features a few more gems in that "light" mood
(the romantic folk-rock a` la
Simon & Garfunkel
of Morning Clouds, the
catchy power-pop of My Head) but truly excels at a more personal kind
of songs, best exemplified by the
quiet philosophical dirges Elevator To Hell and
Let Yourself Glide And Emptily Die, and by the
stoned, bass-heavy blues Clearly See Me.
The songs on Part Three seem more self-conscious, more artful, more
intent upon deconstructing and reconstructing the song format. Therefore we
get the frantic, devilish psychobilly with distorted vocals of Boots,
the cubistic honky-tonk of 100 Miles, the whispered country lullaby of
Climb, the Neil Young-ian waltz Forever, each and every one
slightly skewed and deformed.
This is a science in which the anomalies matter more than the regularities.
Each Day For A Week
All in all, the EPs pile up
an impressive catalog of styles that presents a major new voice in
alternative rock. Very alternative.
(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Eerieconsiliation (SubPop, 1997), the first album by Elevator To Hell, contains sixteen new songs, all recorded in humble settings, and they are keen to emphasize this. In the "lo-fi" field, there are certainly those who have done less. In fact, White displays a shrewd art of arrangement. The sound of the "Elevators to Hell" is modest suburban folk-rock that can unpredictably take on eccentric touches.
The album opens with a nursery rhyme recited over a disjointed, driving score, The Cloud, as if Syd Barrett were playing the part of a Brechtian actor. Barrett and Brecht. Even To Breathe and Inevitably, which are soft and straightforward pop ballads, manage to drift into a tone of near-mental paralysis. Whites repertoir ranges from the driving hard rock of Every Channel to the strummed country allegretto of Hurricane, from the bouncy boogie-soul with Farfisa organ in Window to the psychedelic space-rock of the closing instrumental, I've Gone For A Ride, but always with that nonchalant air of an irredeemable clown.
White's universe is wrapped in a heavy shroud of dark premonitions, from the almost Black Sabbathlike obsessive riff of Backteeth to the sleepwalking trance of Sleep Experiment Number One, from the noirish swing of Suddenly to the hallucinatory feedback effects of The Time Is Grey. By fusing the fragmented authorship of Half Japanese, the clever pop of Sebadoh, and the provincial rock of Pavement, White coins a suggestive musical language.
Judging by this and the previous album, White is an incredibly prolific writer: he was wasted in Eric's Trip. (The handwritten notes by band members use "Elevator Through Hell," not "Elevator To Hell").
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
Elevator Through's Vague Premonition (Subpop, 1999) is a mixed bag.
Almost all the songs are uniformly played at a languid, hazy mid-tempo pace.
During the first half very little happens to wake you up from the torpor.
This spacey psychedelic rock sounds a little monotonous.
The southern-boogie combustion in Rain and The Only See To Thought
comes as a relief.
One has to listen carefully to detect the rhythmic aberrations that made the
early EPs so great: the syncopated ballad Comfortable But Almost,
the limping waltz of Foggy Sea.
The most original tracks come towards the end:
Cut Out The Wick and Vague Premonition.
Here the instruments fly all over the place and chaos helps structure
a more intriguing narrative.
A Taste Of Complete Perspective (Teenage USA, 2000), this time credited
simply to Elevator, is more of the same loose psychedelia.
Julie Doiron's fourth album, Desormais (Jagjaguwar, 2001), is probably
her best so far, a work (mostly sung in French) of intimate feelings and
haunting atmospheres
The fragile, subdued, gentle and melodic Le Piano and the
emotional crescendo of Pour Toujours could be her masterpieces.
Doiron has only one problem: she is not confident that she is a great singer
songwriter. Her songs are too short and too feeble. In other hands, they
"would be" masterpieces.
Doiron concocted another collection of melancholy soliloquies for
Heart and Crime (Jagjaguwar, 2002), but this time the
very subdued pop-jazz arrangements reveal the shortcomings of a music
that relies on very few notions that get repeated over and over again.
This should have been a three-song EP.
Ditto for Goodnight Nobody (Jagjaguwar, 2004), which, if possible,
even more dejected and introverted
(Tonight Is No Night).
Woke Myself Up (Jagjaguwar, 2007) was, instead, relatively upbeat,
relying almost entirely on her old band, Eric's Trip. Not surprisingly, some
of the songs (such as I Woke Myself Up) rank among her most aggressive
performances, and the album has the feeling of a group effort, although still
centered upon her woes.
Chris Thompson of Eric's Trip and Ron Bates formed the duo that released
The Memories Attack (2008).
Dorion's
I Can Wonder What You Did with Your Day (Jagjaguwar, 2009) is varied
and almost encyclopedic, but more like a demonstration of eclectic skills
than an attemp to craft songs that stand out (not even
the single Consolation Prize).
