f Erik Satie were alive today, and recording for Constellation (which, admittedly, Torngat don’t either), it would sound like La Rouge.



The Montreal trio space themselves somewhat drastically from the post-rock monolith that’s begot us five years of Do Make Say Think, Silver Mt. Zion, Le Fly Pan Am, and Godspeed related projects. While Constellation’s made a name on challenging pieces of ambitiously interwoven musical landscapes, like Satie in the early 20th century, Torngat have decided to take a more personal approach to their work.

Pietro Amato’s press tool of having played with the Arcade Fire mirrors Satie’s work in the cabaret, playing simplistic pieces to serve the pleasure hungry bourgeois, while going home to his shack to write masterful flashes of atonal, arrhythmic brilliance. Those masterful flashes for Amato and co. are where Torngat link up with the aforementioned post-rock label.

Constellation, though often regarded as having more pretensions than James Brown, has released some of the most meticulous works to come out of the North in years. Torngat, however, are more informed by jazz and improv than punk and psych, and their relevance to Satie’s Dadaism is evidenced in their conceptual sound. Yes, they are separated from last year’s biggest breakout by one degree; No, that doesn’t mean anything to them. There are no guitars on this album, no pop structures, no overt messages, and the only vocalization is in the album’s opening moments: a woman’s voice speaks French to a background of warehouse sounds and faint conversations.

Starting out with the blended layers of Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come in the background, La Rouge also uses the same haunting, nostalgic francophone accordion that signified Refused’s challenge to the punk structure at the end of their essential album. This vibe sets for a minute before stopping on a Loonie, and giving itself up to a pulsing riff over careful drum taps, quietly bowling down onto toms for a break after two minutes, leading to another reserved beat tipping the high hat to a new modulated accordion line and a minimal melody.

At seven minutes and change, “Nouvelle France” is the EP’s longest track, painting a luscious picture of an open city, worn on the insides from the greed and abuse that built it so strong. Set with beautiful stonework on the outside, designed to ignite the aesthetic emotions of hip-seeking purists, the city is falling apart, but no one will ever know.

Mediated by a minute of soft, rhythmic chimes on “Bell Duet,” “Alberta Sky” is driven by a pounding, sometimes syncopated drums with a gorgeous embedded keyboard melody, using a technique familiar to Godspeed’s with unstoppable toms lifting the song’s texture to a heavy soar. Gentle analog synth tones puncture the air and deflate the melody back to the bass of keyboards, and an accordion comes back to expel all the excess air.

Horn ostinatos punctuate the title track, changing their bases but replying to the xylophone taps with crooning blankets to wrap around the childish toy. It may be bedtime for democracy in the eyes of the progressive Montreal scene’s political landscape, but like Satie knew a hundred years ago, abstinence is the best form of prevention. Staying away from the popularized standards of appropriated creations has lent Torngat a uniquely improvisational sound. Though the horns reminisce of Brian Cram on any of DMST’s recent work, the constantly evolving melodic lines are in staunch difference to Do Make’s gradually growing textures.

The similarities between the two are most defined on the closer, “Bye Bye Sly,” where distant, dissonant horns pull away to syncopated drums, finally pulling back the foreground to pointed glitches and swells.

It was always Satie’s idiosyncratic cusp-delusions that kept his music mysterious. Without those personal characteristics, no doubt his music would have taken a more institutionalized directive. But it’s largely this same kind of autonomy that made Broken Social Scene such a successful product of the new millennium. This is a new direction though, for popular music fans to follow, and the path isn’t so uniformly yellow bricked.