EXIT SOMEONE - Dry Your Eyes

From that small-but-mighty Canadian alt-pop hotbed that brought eccentric personalities like Sean Nicholas Savage and refined acts like TOPS to the fore, 2017 brings what might be its finest output yet, in the shape of a short but thoroughly satisfying six-track EP, a tantalizing taste of a duo with huge potential. Partners in life as well as in art, Thom Gillies (already bassist in the aforementioned TOPS) and June Moon, performing as Exit Someone, deliver a concentrate of smooth, intricate melodies that recall the most glorious era of British indie-pop, while also veering off toward more sophisticated, nuanced territory, with a beguiling jazzy allure.

While the stylistic blend itself doesn't seem especially groundbreaking (what with most artists these days tackling sophisti-pop forms tending to favour keyboards and effects over guitars and bass), the duo's songwriting and compositional chops clearly justify the choice, offsetting any lack of freshness with a solid reworking personality and a strong expressive quality, already more than enough on its own to convince us of the project's worth, and here's hoping it turns out to be far more than a one-off diversion.

Forget the delicate saxophone touches strategically placed in the opening "Fade To Black". Aside from the drum machine, the sole rhythmic backbone for the duo's lyrical impressions, it's guitars and bass that form the main building blocks of Exit Someone's refined musical alchemy, in an instrumental dialectic that brings their results forcefully close to the early intuitions of Prefab Sprout and the compositional clarity of Aztec Camera, crossing crystalline jangle harmonies with hushed jazz enchantments.

Aided by the vocal interplay between Gillies and Moon, both of whom give voice to the stories told across the tracks, it's inevitably Paddy McAloon's band that springs to mind, helped along by a certain closeness in tone ("Austrian Amnesia", left to Wendy Smith to sing, wouldn't have sounded all that different) and a similar inventiveness in crafting melodies that are complex yet never anything less than accessible, fully honoring their pop dimension. Despite the absence of any rousing upbeat tracks, the EP in fact finds plenty of room for memorable hooks, making the most of the duo's sinuous delivery, which lends itself well to bringing the rich symbolism of the lyrics to life.

In particular, it's on "Forbidden Colours" that Exit Someone show off the full range of their skill and compositional versatility: between rises and restarts, a striking close, and jingle-jangle guitar lines of melancholy beauty dusted with subtle textures, the magical realism flowing from the duo's pen finds the perfect platform to sing of "love and loss" with all the requisite pathos and subtlety, in a perfectly balanced whole.

All told, things get serious right from the start: if this is merely a taste of what Gillies and Moon are capable of, there's more than a faint sense that the great sophisti-pop masterpiece of the 2010s might be just around the corner.

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06/04/2017