For some time, Jacques Greene’s curious career was defined by the French-Canadian producer’s knack for fusing different modes of dance music with contemporary pop and R&B influences. Philippe Aubin-Dionne’s curatorial ears (and eyes; he previously worked as an art director) helped him navigate electronic music’s shifting trends. But where his debut LP, Feel Infinite, took an insular approach, Aubin-Dionne’s sophomore album, Dawn Chorus, treats the Jacques Greene project more like a band. Inspired by groups like Massive Attack and Slowdive, he brought on producer and Oneohtrix Point Never collaborator Joel Ford as well as contributions from Brian Reitzell, Oliver Coates, and Julianna Barwick. The result feels at once intimate yet immense—a collection of ruminative dance tracks with a shoegaze heart.
The muscular loops of last year’s Fever Focus EP, crafted for peak-hour DJ sets, made for an incremental step forward, but Dawn Chorus largely abandons the pretense of the club altogether. From the instant that the smeared rave sirens of “Serenity” go soaring across snippets of indistinct radio chatter, it’s clear that Aubin-Dionne is just as concerned with kindling introspection as he is with moving bodies. It’s a trick he pulls off differently on almost every track: Rainy field recordings envelop mid-album highlight “Sel,” and spirals of hazy, resampled textures on “Let Go” set the stage for a moody guest turn from Toronto-based singer Rochelle Jordan.
Until now, Jacques Greene’s signature move has been to lift melodies from beloved singers like Mario and Brandy, slicing them into wistful refrains. He was hardly the first to repurpose R&B vocals—what up, Burial—but Aubin-Dionne understands that the provenance of his samples is less important than the vocalists’ charismatic timbres, rendered mystical by washes of synth. Instead of falling back on familiar sources, he opts to alchemize his guests’ voices into hooks, occasionally ceding the spotlight altogether, as on “Let Go” and the acid-tinged “Night Service,” with Cadence Weapon. Unfortunately, Cadence falls a bit flat as he rhapsodizes about a night out during the bloghouse days of yore, when DJs used to play the Rapture. It’s charming but awkward.
Dawn Chorus is most compelling when the production does the bulk of the talking. Nearly a decade into his career, Jacques Greene continues to hone his sound design and arrangements. Much of Dawn Chorus was recorded at Hudson Mohawke’s Los Angeles studio, where Aubin-Dionne set out to wrangle new sounds from specific pieces of hardware used by his musical heroes. You get the sense that exploring unfamiliar equipment in new spaces has helped him find new possibilities in his own work—that by plunging himself into guitar pedals and classic French-house compression modules, he’s ushered in a new era for Jacques Greene without losing sight of his unique sentimentality. “For Love,” possibly the only track geared for the floor, turns a hit by Canadian disco outfit THP Orchestra into a pumping funky house number with a dream-pop middle eight. The expansive “Drop Location,” co-produced by Aubin-Dionne’s old friend Clams Casino, shows that the cloud rap pioneer’s chilly tendencies pair well with Jacques Greene’s newfound love of distorted drones.
The shoegaze influence is most apparent near the end of the album. Hesitant arpeggios waft through a barren Shlohmo-esque atmosphere on “Understand,” while the seven-minute closer “Stars” is a slow-burning meditation on nature and childhood, undergirded by the steady pulse of warehouse drums. Aubin-Dionne’s gleaming synthesizers ebb and flow; the woozy swells and quietly crackling drones flank the spectral spoken-word passages of another Toronto artist, Sandrine Somé. Eventually, Somé trails off, and so do the resonant pads, leaving a lone breakbeat to loop into the ether. The brooding, ambient nature of Dawn Chorus suggests that one day, Jacques Greene just might abandon dance music altogether—but for now, it’s a form that he continues to reshape in his own way with each new release.
Buy: Rough Trade
