Myriam Gendron’s last record Ma délire – Songs of love, lost & found played out like a scrapbook of ripped pages which had been recovered from a shipwreck, lusty and elemental as she reinterpreted traditional music from the United States, France and Quebec, including the roots revival standard ‘Go Away From My Window’ which was quoted by Bob Dylan before being covered by Linda Ronstadt and Joan Baez, the Quebecois tune ‘Au coeur de ma délire’ which was endowed with a cinematic quality through the snap and crackle of ambient sounds like chirping crickets, radio snippets and the clank and hiss of a boat repair shop which had been converted from an old mill, an emotionally laden take on the wide waters and waxing romance of ‘Waly Waly’, and a ‘Poor Girl Blues’ which combined ‘Poor Boy, Long Ways From Home’, one of the oldest songs in the blues repertoire, with the song of forced French Canadian exile ‘Un Canadien errant’.
Mayday by contrast is furnished with a little more warmth as Gendron is joined for several songs by the fuzzy guitar and drums of the improvisational stalwarts Marisa Anderson and Jim White, the bassist Cédric Dind-Lavoie who shares her penchant for lacing traditionalism with the avant-garde, the looped-and-screwed guitarist Bill Nace and the Appalachian tenor saxophonist Zoh Amba, whose Ayleresque horn gets the last word on the album. Even the instrumental opener ‘There Is No East Or West’ captures a little bit of that lamplight sound, as though emanating from a cosy porch or played around a crackling hearth, but Gendron still knows just when and how to pull the rug as her songs – mostly originals sung once more in a mixture of English and French – often carry an air of wistful melancholy, sometimes veering in the directions of free jazz or primitive guitar, with her voice plucking and chafing against a time-honoured melody.
There is even a little bit of Nashville Skyline about Mayday, with ‘Long Way Home’ carrying a similar chord progression to ‘Girl from the North Country’. ‘Terres brûlées’ is a chanson from a text written in classical French alexandrines, with Gendron’s rendition bearing a gothic quality which subverts the old epic or romantic form, described by the artist as a song which evokes the idea of a ‘ravaged landscape’. The sheer tonality of ‘Lully Lullay’ is redolent of ‘Waly Waly’ from Ma délire, while ‘Dorothy’s Blues’ pays tribute to her old amour Dorothy Parker, the caustic Algonquin Round Table wit whose poeticisms were the source of Gendron’s debut album Not So Deep As A Well.
And on the album closer ‘Berceuse’, the yearning and caterwauling saxophone of Zoh Amba cuts through the lullaby to suggest that this whole thing was a ruse: we thought that we were gathered round the hearth for some torch songs and chanson, but in fact all this while the room has been on fire, and Gendron through a flickering amber glow and the tenebrous gloom has been busy sending out a distress signal.
