Eric Trio Chenaux Delights Of My Life

Following the release of Eric Chenaux's last album Say Laura (2022), The Guardian wrote"the Canadian songwriter has one of the all-time great singing voices in popular music, anintensely romantic Chet Baker-ish instrument that seems to float with piercing direction,like a paper aeroplane thrown hard through mist." With Uncut describing his songcraft "asdelicate and lovely as a rare orchid" and Record Collector praising the album's "sublimealien balladry" such are the accolades that have accrued throughout Chenaux's uniqueand consummately uncompromising solo music for well over a decade now.Delights Of My Life opens a new chapter for the singer/guitarist and formally introducesthe Eric Chenaux Trio, with Toronto-based musicians Ryan Driver on Wurlitzer organ andPhillipe Melanson on electronic percussion. Driver is a longtime collaborator, appearingon several of Chenaux's solo albums (even embedded into the very title of the 2010masterpiece Warm Weather With Ryan Driver). Melanson has a long list of involvementsthat include Bernice, Joseph Shabason, and U.S Girls, and a recent release with hisImpossible Burger project on Chenaux's own experimental label Rat-drifting, but thismarks the first fulsome involvement between the two as players on a recording.In many ways Delights Of My Life also picks up right where Chenaux's previous albumleft off, in its subversions of a classic, timeless jazz-inflected balladry, while the interplayof the trio formation indeed unfurls many new delights. Recording together at Chenaux'sspartan home studio in rural France, Driver's harmonically warped organ and Melanson'selectroacoustic sampling and percussion hold time in newfound ways. Where previouslyChenaux relied on a freeze/sustain pedal and minimalist rhythmic triggers to generate bothpulse and chordal foundations, Melanson now paints timekeeping with expressive andintricate colourations, through live deployments of fluid sampled percussion (includingorchestral timbres like timpani, k...