Native Speaker - Braids

Braids

Native Speaker

Flemish Eye / Kanine Records

Usually, when you describe an album as ‘unsafe’, it’s with some sort of ‘it’s so-good-it’ll-make-your-face-melt’ cliché. With Native Speaker, it’s because I find myself inclined to balance my laptop precariously over the edge of my bathtub, while I sink slowly underneath, and mellow for as long as I can hold my breath. Braids – this Albertan, chill-core four-piece – might well be the death of me. But what a way to go, ‘ey.

Braids sound like the farm-grown younger sisters of Animal Collective, who’ve ditched the electronic edge for a much more pastoral feel – opener ‘Lemonade’ follows the same pile-then-peel layering as most of Merriweather Post Pavilion, each new pitch and instrumental layer rising from previous like bubbles boiling through water, though Raphaelle Standell-Preston vocals are notably less static and reverb fuelled than Noah Lennox’s (aka AC’s Panda Bear). The song washes well, and leaves us less sceptical of follower ‘Plath Hearth’, which is laid out more like ‘Disney musical number’ than art rock, but it’s pleasant nonetheless – the swiping violins and vocal intonations at its close giving clear allusions to Arcade Fire and Régine Chassagne (particularly earlier recordings), their hometown of Montreal perhaps having an effect as the album’s recording location.

Undeniably, it is Raphaelle’s vocals that centralise the lasting image of Native Speaker, effortlessly bounding it seems between the fragility and naivety of a lost child (how on earth she managed this with the lyrics ‘I’m fucked up, fucked up, fucked up’ in ‘Glass Deers’, I don’t know), to the unhinged sound of a mid-20s meltdown (‘Lammicken’). At times, her vocals are so deeply accented and empowering that the effect is almost ethnic; the sound of the savannah, of open space and wide, bellowing fields of music (if we’re keeping to the Disney vibe, think ‘Circle of Life’).

I don’t know, perhaps I’m revelling in this album a tad too much. I was in an utterly foul mood when I came to listen to it, but somehow Braids have managed to wash away that whole frame of mind. Ebbing, coursing, yet serene – like a poolside half-echo, their sound is profoundly comforting, and makes for a very easy listen. 

To call this mood music really doesn’t do it any justice at all, but needless to say, it’s cheered me up.

9/10