Following the release of her new album Mayday, Myriam Gendron has announced a run of tour dates in the UK and Europe. The tour includes a headline show at London’s Cafe OTO and a performance at Blue Bird Festival in Austria.
Thomas Blake opened his KLOF Mag review of Mayday: Myriam Gendron’s music is not easy to write about. She doesn’t rely on fireworks. Her singing and guitar playing is entirely devoid of gimmick. There are no cheap tricks, no bones thrown to the too-casual listener, but neither does she draw you in with difficulty or with discordance. Her third album, Mayday, doesn’t seek to create a single, definitive mood, or peddle a unifying theme. And yet moods and themes, difficulties and discordances, do emerge. She trades in subtleties: the nuanced play between traditional music and original songwriting, the differences and similarities between the French and English languages, the lightness of touch that illuminates – softly and from the inside – songs about grief or joy.
He concludes: Myriam Gendron’s art, for all its surface simplicity, harbours a wealth of emotional and aesthetic complexities which, when taken together, form a wholly unique sound. Mayday is the most moving and persuasive example of that sound to date.
The album featured guitarist Marisa Anderson and drummer Jim White (Dirty Three), whose latest album, Swallowtail, is out now. Additional players included Montreal bassist Cédric Dind-Lavoie (a fellow fan of trad/avant dynamism), Bill Nace and saxophonist Zoh Amba (whose horn actually gets the final “word”).
Order Myriam Gendron’s Mayday:
Myriam Gendron UK and EU tour dates
Nov. 10 – Hebden Bridge, UK – The Trades Club [tickets]
Nov. 11 – London, UK – Cafe Oto [tickets]
Nov. 14 – Rouen, FR – Le 106
Nov. 15 – Lyon, FR – Le Sonic
Nov. 16 – Mouans-Sarthoux, FR – Mediathèque de Mouans-Sarthoux
Nov. 17 – Paris, FR – Café de la Danse
Nov. 19 – Brussels, BE – Witloof Bar
Nov. 20 – Cologne, DE – 674FM
Nov. 22 – Vienna, AU – Blue Bird Festival