About two minutes into her Hello EP, there's a thrilling moment where Caila Thompson-Hannant quits trying to be perfect. "Mozart's Sister", the airy, carbonated number that opens the Montreal electro-pop artist's EP, finds our titular heroine crushing on someone who, it seems, is out of her league. (How could you go for someone like her, she wonders, when "you've got that look, and the whole world like you do?") She delivers these lines with anguish, but like most of the feelings explored on the EP, the wallowing is short-lived. Throughout Hello, Thompson-Hannant flows through different tones, styles and emotions like an overactive mood ring. ("[I'm] always ripping through a new thought," she sings later on "Contentedness," and on cue the song morphs into something else.) The bridge of "Mozart's Sister" feels like a turning point, and maybe even a personal liberation. "Ah, but it's cool," she mutters a couple of times, quiet at first and then suddenly soaring, lighter than air. Her voice sounds like a kite riding the winds of the synth crescendo around it by the time she gets to the best line in the song, "Knowing I'll never be king has set me free."
The next 12 minutes make good on that revelation-- which is to say that things only get freer, looser, and a whole lot weirder from there. Over the span of this 14-minute, four-song EP, Thompson-Hannant will compare herself to "dirt" and "poo," she will make baby sounds ("You got me crawling on my hands and knees like a baby/ Goin' goo goo ga goo"), she will sample what at least appears to be her actual voicemail message, she will give one of music's coolest-ever Simone de Beauvoir shout outs ("And I'll be rockin' The Second Sex famously"), she will mumble spoken-word dialogue that sounds like an agoraphobic practicing casual conversation in a mirror ("Hey/ Oh, hey friend/ How were your... holidays?"). But the miracle of the Hello EP is that these songs are never weighed down by her eccentricity; thanks to her keen ability to craft a featherlight pop hook, Thompson-Hannant makes even the clumsiest, most anxious feelings take flight. She's called her sound "bedroom paranoia," a tongue-in-cheek double entendre that accounts for both her DIY aesthetic (the EP was self-recorded) as well as her lyrical preoccupation with the anxieties of crushing, dating, and intimacy. Though comparisons to some of her Montreal peers are inevitable, a lot of her emotionally candid, frayed-nerve lyrics (like "Don't Leave It To Me"'s kinetic chant, "Fear, fear, fear/ Sex, sex, sex") wouldn't sound out of place in an Autre Ne Veut song.
Thompson-Hannant has done time in a handful of bands, but outside of Montreal she's probably best known as one of two vocalists from the art pop band Shapes and Sizes. Their three albums had exciting moments but were often overcrowded with ideas; without fail, Thompson-Hannant's vocals were the most memorable part of a Shapes and Sizes song. Her transition from co-vocalist to solo artist feels like a wise career move. Thompson-Hannant's voice is soulful, distinct and expressive enough to be the single focal point of a song, but she also has a knack for exploring (and occasionally finding offbeat humor in) isolation and loneliness. "Sure I got friends, I've probably got more friends than you," she sings on "Single Status", a tossed-off boast that turns quickly to a self-deprecating punchline, "I just don't ever see 'em/ They're probably busy doing/ Whatever it is that they do."
Brief as it is, Hello does show a bit of range, moving from 80s-leaning bubblegum mysticism (her name isn't the only thing about the project that evokes the angsty British duo Shakespears Sister) to looser, DIY-funk-tinged numbers. The excellent "Don't Leave It to Me" is an electric, sub-three-minute pop song that perfectly captures the simultaneous joy and the terror of new love, while the next song, "Contentedness", is something else entirely: a guitar-driven, palm-muted meditation on the challenges of finding happiness ("Contentedness, you can come on in/ But I wouldn't take your shoes off") that ambles its way towards the six-minute mark. But just as she finds liberation in imperfection on "Mozart's Sister", Thompson-Hannant (never one to brood for too long) comes to a similarly empowering conclusion here: "I'm prone to flight, and I like it that way."
Because of its brevity and rough edges, Hello feels more like an introductory handshake than a fully-realized debut, but it nonetheless hints at a promising future. It will be interesting to see if Mozart's Sister can strike a balance between grit and gloss: this EP's handmade, isolated feel is a big part of its charm, but it also hints that she's capable of something more ambitious. Grimes is a decent comparison only because she's successfully found that particular balance, but in the end, she and Mozart's Sister are reappropriating pop in an attempt to do two different things. Grimes finds power in ambiguity-- the pop element of her music is about tapping into something universal but hard to pin down. The more lyric-driven Mozart's Sister finds power in the act of sharply articulating (and unabashedly celebrating) very specific feelings. For her, pop is the fairy godmother of everyday life, transforming imperfection into freedom, anxiety into ecstasy, and awkward moments into alternative-universe #1 hits.
