“Untitled”—the last song on Julie Doiron's new release, Woke Myself Up—employs the exact same instrumentation as when I saw Doiron play live two years ago: vocals and electric guitar, nothing more. She could've played “Untitled” that night, but I wouldn't remember; nothing stood out about her set. The song is nice to listen to only in the sense that it brings back personal aesthetics: memories of seeing the show, the people I went with, the room she played in. It's sad to say, but I don't know if anything else other than kitschy autobiographical memories could get me to listen to this album and really enjoy it.
Doiron has a long-running history with Eric's Trip, a brilliant but mostly defunct Canadian four-piece. The band was great mostly thanks to main songwriter (and Doiron's former boyfriend) Rick White and his creative production techniques—”lo-fi,” if you have to call it something. As a result, I was shocked (shocked!) to find out that White had produced and played (along with the rest of Eric's Trip) on almost all of Woke Myself Up. It seems that the album gave White a chance to show how flexible he can be when it comes to producing records—or maybe he didn't involve himself that much? I wonder only because the record, at times, comes nervously close to being adult alternative (see: Jewel, Norah Jones, but with less of a budget).
Bands with this kind of production and tone work usually because the songwriting is superb, and so it is that only two songs are able to execute it: “Dark Horse” and “You Look So Alive.” “Dark Horse” exemplifies her songwriting at its best—she sings “I'm writing you from Montreal/to tell you that I don't belong here/I'm writing you from Montreal/bye-bye” over a classic but consistent folk backbeat. Her cadence and lyricism demonstrate either a result of painstaking craftsmanship on her part or a happy accident. I'm rooting for the former, because it means that a great album by Doiron is only a matter of effort, not luck.
