Myriam Gendron - Mayday [Green]

Myriam Gendron is a Montreal songwriter who began by setting Dorothy Parker's poems to music and has been quietly building one of the most distinctive catalogues in contemporary folk ever since. Mayday is her third album and the first made with a full band.

She sings in both French and English, often on the same record and occasionally in the same breath, and the switching is never decorative. "There Is No East Or West" and "Look Down That Lonesome Road" work traditional American material. "Terres brûlées" and "Quand j'étais jeune et belle" come from the Québécois tradition she grew up in. Her guitar playing is the constant, fingerpicked and unhurried, and the guests know to stay out of its way. Marisa Anderson and Jim White appear on "Lully Lullay," and Zoh Amba's saxophone closes the album on "Berceuse" with the only genuinely unruly playing here.

It is a record about grief that never announces itself as one, which is the hardest version of that to make.

Pressed on green vinyl by Feeding Tube Records.