The Ontario duo Memoryhouse began not as a band so much as an art project. Denise Nouvion was a photographer who took dreamy, spectral-haunted photographs, and Evan Abeele a music school grad with an equal love of neo-classical composers and My Bloody Valentine. After meeting through friends a few years ago, Nouvion and Abeele embarked on a collaboration: He composed minimalist instrumental tracks to soundtrack her short films and accompany her photo exhibits. At some point, though, Nouvion's plaintive, placid-lake vocals got added to the mix, Abeele started writing bridges and choruses, and Memoryhouse morphed into a full-fledged dream pop band.
It's fitting, then, that the band's full-length debut, The Slideshow Effect, which they say refers to "the photographic/cinematic technique of zooming and panning to animate still images" (I guess The Ken Burns Effect lacked a certain poeticism), is scattered with pictures. In "Bonfire" Nouvion sings about throwing photos in a pool and, later, holding a print up to light to wistfully observe the fingerprints it bears, while on the gently melancholy "Punctum" she comes to a conclusion that will ring true to anyone who's ever fallen into a late-night abyss of Facebook photo flipping: "It's not enough to live your past through photographs."
It's tempting-- given the band's creation story and the record's overall aesthetic-- to dismiss Memoryhouse as the ultimate example of a tumblr come to life and calling itself a rock band. (The cover, shot by Nouvion, doesn't help.) But a closer listen to The Slideshow Effect reveals that there's more to them than that: Unassuming as they occasionally feel, the tracks have a solid construction, visible through the fog-free clarity of Abeele and recently recruited bassist Barzin Hassani's production. Operating in a subgenre where every producer's M.O. seems to be "I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more reverb," Memoryhouse's sound is refreshingly articulate.
They're at their best when they kick up the tempo-- the bright, drum-machine sputter of "The Kids Were Wrong" is an early highlight-- though they don't seem to have realized this yet: The back half of the record sags with pleasant but near-indistinguishable slow jams such as "Pale Blue" and "Kinds of Light". Still, in its more compelling moments, The Slideshow Effect's overall vibe of glistening inertia isn't a strike against it, but rather an embodiment of its central theme. The album is a painstaking portrayal of the dissolution of a relationship, which makes its frozen, photogenic poses take on a kind of poignancy: Stay stock-still and everything will remain as it's always been; move a muscle and it all falls apart. Nouvion uses some variation of the phrase "lie still" at least half a dozen times. "Go to sleep, nothing's changing," she sings with a potent twinge of self-denial on "The Kids Were Wrong", "I'll be right here by your side."
Memoryhouse frequently get compared to Beach House, who explored similar themes on their magnificently gloomy 2010 album, Teen Dream. Memoryhouse have a ways to go before they're creating music with as much melodic power or depth of feeling as their dream-pop contemporaries. But as their development from the gallery to the stage has shown, there's every reason to believe that The Slideshow Effect is just a baby picture.
