Chilly Gonzales is one of those musicians you know for his sheer tenacity rather than any breakthrough moment; he's perfected the art of sticking around. His discography is overshadowed by the names he has worked with—Jamie Lidell, Daft Punk, and many musicians from Canada's indie and electro circles, such as Peaches and Feist (he was a key contributor to the Grammy-nominated The Reminder). It's more likely that you own several albums with his name in the credits than one with his name on the cover.
It doesn't help that he's changed his name and style several times. Gonzales' influences encompass classical, jazz, rap, chill-out music and easy-listening pop, and he continually reshuffles them to emphasize one strand or another. Before the '90s were out, he quit the Warner Bros.-signed Canadian alt-rock band Son, moved to Berlin and started releasing keyboard-driven coffeehouse electro under the apocryphal surname Gonzales. Then he came back in the '00s as Chilly Gonzales, a pop-classical songwriter and pianist with a sideline in '70s radio pastiches (see the album Soft Power).
In chamber music, he found something like a solid niche. Gonzales' neo-Romantic mode has been his most productive in recent years, with the second of two Solo Piano albums being longlisted for the Polaris Prize. He returns to it on Chambers, a modest, plush song cycle with the new addition of string arrangements performed by Hamburg's capable Kaiser Quartett. The configuration allows Gonzales to build out his Satie-like compositions into homages to other composers from classical music history.
But Chambers should not be mistaken for the kind of contemporary classical coming out of Naxos, ECM or New Amsterdam. Victoire, Nico Muhly, Valgeir Sigurðsson or yMusic, for instance, all sound downright recondite next to Gonzales. He is more interested in where the form has been, and, as he tells us in liner notes and a Vice op-ed, in making us hear it as Schubert was heard in his day—as pop. With Impressionist and minimalist diversions, he plies an extroverted row that ends in the Romantic era, untroubled by dissonance, alternate tonality or complex time. It's as if Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Varèse never happened.
Gonzales has a soft, precise touch on the piano, tastefully decorating nimble progressions with expressive spills through nearby scales. As an admittedly novice string arranger, he favors ranks of staccato pulses and gently fencing legato lines, splicing them effectively on "Advantage Points". On "Prelude to a Feud", cascading piano arpeggios inspired by Bach and electronic dance music break out into a Tchaikovsky-like courtly dance. "Cello Gonzales" fashions the instrument of the title, with its plaintive vocal quality, into a Mendelssohn tribute. "Sweet Burden" channels dreamy, pensive French Impressionists; the lush, broad eddies of "Green Leaves" summon Vivaldi; "Solitaire" and others pine for Schubert.
Gonzales makes some valid claims for the album's pop aspects—"Sample This" purports to transmute a Southern rap bounce track, while "Switchcraft" is modeled on Juicy J's asymmetrical flow. You can hear it if you try, but it's unlikely that a casual listener will perceive these as bangers. Gonzales' limited interest in forms and textures beyond pristine, overt beauty level the record out toward soundtrack music, consistent with crowd-pleasers such as Peter Broderick, without many layers to peel back over time. Though enjoyable, it may land in a limbo, too simplistic for fans of great chamber music or its challenging modern variants; too classical—lacking bells, whistles, samples and beats—to make it more than pleasant dinner party music for people coming from the indie side.
