Marin Patenaude – Sight Unseen
Dine Alone Records / Still Records – Digital Out Now
Marin Patenaude’s last recorded outing, being my introduction to her glorious voice, was as the guest vocalist on a 2018 collaborative project with the Juno-winning instrumental outfit and fellow Vancouverites, Pugs & Crows. The stunning result of their joint efforts was Uncle!, an alternative rock record brimming with breathtaking moments of surging emotion. Especially impressive was the intense 4th track, Postcards from Hospital Beds: the album is on Bandcamp, and I urge you to check it out.
I was fortunate to witness one of the few domestic live appearances to promote Uncle!, and besides Pugs & Crows’ instrumental brilliance I’ve rarely seen as riveting a performer as Patenaude, who absolutely owned that stage. Yet as totally at home as she was as the frontwoman of that presumably (though hopefully not) one-off lineup, when delivering her own rootsier material – as gorgeously presented on her second album, Sight Unseen – somehow Patenaude’s voice is even more affecting.
Patenaude – sister of Pharis Romero – released her excellent solo debut, Marin Patenaude & The Follow Through, in 2016, and I bought my copy immediately after hearing Uncle! That said, had I learned of the album upon release just one look at who plays on it would have sold me. All highly visible as among the best in their fields in this part of the world, between them the members of The Follow Through have played with artists such as Tanya Tagaq, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Destroyer, Real Ponchos, Dan Mangan, Frazey Ford, and, indeed, Pugs & Crows. Of that adept ensemble, for Sight Unseen there are three returnees in guitarist Cole Schmidt, cellist Peggy Lee and pedal steel guitarist Scott Smith. Joining them are drummers Skye Brooks (Copilots / Fond of Tigers) and John Raham (Pharis & Jason Romero / Kelly Joe Phelps), bassist Pete Schmitt (Copilots / Inhabitants), and organist Chris Gestrin, who mastered Patenaude’s debut, and whose insane CV has seen him contribute as a musician or in a technical capacity to over 300 albums.
Patenaude cites fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Sarah McLachlan as influences, as well as Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco, and I hear all of the above from a compositional perspective. Vocally, as described in the Vancouver publication The Georgia Straight by my contemporary Alex Varty, Patenaude possesses “genuine star power.” He’s spot on, so in that regard think of cultured, impassioned singers whose delivery and tone are inherently imbued with deep-seated emotion, like Annie Lennox, Sam Phillips, k.d lang or Roberta Flack, to name but four. Yep, Patenaude is blessed with one of those voices that could make you well up just by singing the contents of a lawnmower user’s manual to you.
Self-produced, recorded at Vancouver’s Afterlife Studios and Public Alley 421 by Raham and Gestrin respectively, and mastered by João Carvalho (Donovan Woods / Hayden / The Sheepdogs), Sight Unseen is a dreamy, dramatic and sophisticated album of considerable artistry, infused with country, folk and rock elements, while not really slotting into any of those pigeonholes. Lyrically, too, it’s a work of great intelligence, honesty and occasional quirk, especially as evident in the second track, The Build, a song expressing the joys and frustrations of building your own home, from which I love these excerpts:
The walls are unfinished, the floor is exposed and the chandelier flickers / I smashed my knuckles wielding an Estwing®, swinging
All of it’s crooked, nothing sits square, it’s a carpenters nightmare / I filled in the cracks but the breeze always tracks me down
Slide ‘cross the floor, fill your socks full of slivers and curse like a heathen / No one is listening, no one can hear, use the lord’s name in vain
Another tremendous lyric populates the robust country-rocker Paint It Green, which takes square aim at the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, the producers of genetically modified food, and North American fast food culture in general:
The Midwest joys of corn and soy grow high and mighty / But it costs too much so we feed the lots on crackers and candy
Ruminants in confinements of the feeding operation / Fed hormone shots and robbed of thought through genetic mutation / There sits a steak on your dinner plate / This is what makes America great / May god protect and feed the next generation
There are so many luxurious moments on this beautiful record, but the biggest of them all is the centrepiece, Gone Blind, which is worth the price of admission alone. At six-and-a-half slow-burning minutes it’s Sight Unseen’s longest track, epic in scale, and from the 2:40 to 3:08 marks features the perfect example of the soaring power of Patenaude’s incredible, spine-tingling voice. Pure class. Don’t let this album pass you by.
In closing, I dedicate this review to the memory of the late Karl Bareham, who mixed Sight Unseen. Originally from Suffolk, Bareham worked extensively with City and Colour’s Dallas Green, who founded and runs Patenaude’s Canadian label, Still Records. Popularly known as ‘Horse,’ Bareham died in a tragic scuba diving accident in Australia in September last year. I cannot clarify that Sight Unseen was the very last project he worked on, but if it was he left this world at the absolute top of his game.
https://www.marinpatenaude.com/
Photo Credit: Ariana Flynn