Don’t let the unfamiliar name and empty discography fool you: Graham Walsh and Julie Fader, the creative forces driving Etiquette and its debut full-length Reminisce, are veterans of Canada’s diverse indie rock scene. Walsh was a founding member of hard-charging ‘00s electro outfit Holy Fuck, with an impressive production and engineering résumé to boot: he’s worked on recent efforts by Metz, Viet Cong, and Alvvays, a collection of good records from bands with terrible names. (Perhaps it’s familiar terrain for a co-founder of Holy Fuck.) Fader has lent her voice to a handful of decent folk-rock records, and she released a set of unassuming folk-pop under her own name in 2009. While Walsh worked with Fader on that record, their work together as Etiquette is more of an equal partnership: she handled the bulk of the songwriting, Walsh shaped the album’s sound and atmosphere.
Walsh’s work with Holy Fuck revolved around the creation of electronic music’s sounds, rhythms, and shapes using entirely analog means. You can hear the vestiges of that idea on Reminisce, even though the album’s mood is very different from that of LP or Latin: there’s a texture and an unpredictability to the instrumentation that keeps it from feeling cool or sterile. Instead, Reminisce feels warm and cocooned, with synth melodies that hang low, heavy, and liquid. There are some saturated bass lines on the album, but those synths end up bearing a lot of rhythmic weight. They’re wrapped tight around Fader’s voice, with a balance between intimacy and spareness that’s reminiscent of bands like the xx.
While some songs on the album take on a little of Holy Fuck’s bite and speed (the aggressive "Twinkling Stars", for example), the best ones are allowed to roast like they’re bubbling in a Crock-Pot, slow and humid. "Attention Seeker", a venomous wake-up call to a friend, is an obvious highlight, looming thick and heavy. The pace and density pair well with Fader’s narrow, affectless vocals, but I spent much of the remainder of Reminisce wishing for more range and dynamism on her part. A little variety and boldness could’ve been put to good use on the album’s back half, where tracks start to blend together into one wet, smoggy cloud.
Reminisce does receive occasional jolts from the contrast between its sound and lyrical themes. Fader and Walsh’s partnership extends beyond the studio to their domestic lives, and they’re working with a set of consciously "sexy" signifiers, but this isn’t a collection of goopy love songs. It’s colored by loneliness and uncertainty, and even a bit of sourness. "Brown and Blue" is a good example, with Fader singing over synth patterns that sound a bit like Tame Impala: "It’s the tilt of your head when you try to decipher/ What I am saying/ And the look in your eyes, I can’t tell/ If it’s weary or overwhelmed." The song ends on a more positive note, but you can’t get into that kind of detail unless you’ve spent enough time staring at someone’s face to recognize tiny changes; they’re the sort of minute physical reactions that happen naturally when you’re tired of trading blows over something that’s ultimately meaningless. It’s subtle bits of writing like this that make Reminisce’s intimacy feel real and earned: peeks at the work it takes to keep love alive and thriving.
