Rating: NNN
You’ll Never Get to Heaven’s 2012 debut introduced these intriguing new players on the lo-fi pop scene. The London, Ontario, duo’s ambient, electronic LP bubbled with precious nuggets of retro crinkle and classical piano under bleary production.
Their follow-up, Adorn, never quite achieves that same homemade intimacy or the sweet simplicity (and catchiness) of a song like You’ve Got The Sun. But repeat listens prove that, though slicker (especially 80s-pop-inspired Caught In Time, So Far Away), it’s still affecting, unsettling music (especially the ambient instrumentals). Alice Hansen’s childlike vocals are still buried amid Chuck Blazevic’s washes of tone and laptop tricks so that, like its predecessor, Adorn always sounds like music coming from another room. A cover of pianist Erik Satie’s piano Enfantillages Pittoresques: Berceuse captures the band’s uneasy mood perfectly, and, like the EP, ends abruptly, leaving the listener with a distinct sense of melancholy.
Top track: Adorn
You’ll Never Get to Heaven play the Long Winter Fest at the Great Hall, Friday (March 7).
