by Matthew Sigur (@MatthewSigur)
Corridor has crafted the ultimate ode to the brute on Junior. The Montreal band’s third album, and Sub Pop debut, was recorded quickly in the spring to meet a deadline. Unlike the rock quartet’s previous, indulgently recorded releases, Junior captures an urgent spirit. The immediacy comes from sugary shoegaze melodies, not-so-stylized production, and self-aware storytelling.
On the album’s lead-off track, “Topographe,” Corridor establishes its cool krautrock against lyrics sung entirely in French. “At first, some steps/and now, thousands on the ground,” the lyrics of the first song roughly translate. Vocalists Dominic Berthiaum and Jonathan Robert sing the lines in call and response as guitar lines race, all staccato sixteenth notes, against drummer Julien Bakvis’ steady groove.
Junior is full of crackling sounds from tube amps, tape machines and the tightly-wound snare drum. The guitars are just slightly out of tune, here and there, but such imperfections are perfect for this casually cool band. It’s the type of album that makes you nostalgic for the college days, when you and a friend would argue about those mid-00’s bands like Shout Out Louds, The Twilight Sad, British Sea Power — the list goes on. They were all European, and wrote exactly one tune that you two could agree was excellent. Each track on Junior could be that one tune.
If you get your hands on a translator (or Google), the album is full of lyrics that are self-deprecating, sad, startling, warm and whimsical — all at once. The title track is a tribute to guitarist Julien Perreault, the “joueur étoile” (“star player”) who weaves webs of guitar riffs as his parents continue to be disappointed in his career choice. More characters file across the album: the spy in “Agent Double,” a hack professor in “Grand Cheval,” and the ultimate slacker in the closing track “Bang.”
Those lyrics comment on the daily dilly dally of a twenty-something, reading like a story of a modern, more rock ‘n’ roll Llewyn Davis. Each song is a portrait of a person who is afraid of the future yet races to keep up with the present while running away from a constantly haunting past. In each character, there’s shame and self-awareness. “The tired body and mind,” the lyrics of “Bang” loosely translate. “The heavy burden of the worst fucker. Yes, I will pay sooner or later.”
Unlike the beats and brats of your college years, these Montreal punks get it. Back then, you might have thought, “Eventually, I’ll grow up. Eventually, something will change.” Given time and perspective, you realize, “Not much changes after all.” Corridor isn’t a band full of those “worst fuckers,” though. The music makes the memories hurt less; it makes that blunt, brute youth seem a bit more beautiful.