Corridor – Mimi (Sub pop) – There’s something rather delightful about the new Corridor album, the French Canadian band aren’t doing anything that demanding, there’s no great big noise, no great artistic statement, no off with their music heads and vive la révolution, nothing like that, they’ve just quietly made a really gorgeous album. Mimi is an album alive with lushness, with gentle motorik undercurrents, with a knowing set of smiles (as wide as crocodiles), just a very very (very) satisfying album. There’s something about the songs, the tunes, about the glowing details within the tunes. There’s a knowing maturity to this latest Corridor album, knowing is the word, a knowingness, a glow, a refined sound, crafted, not quite widescreen but yes, more expansive than before.
Corridor’s fourth album, Mimi, the follow-up to 2019’s Junior and I guess if you get as far as your fourth without imploding you are a serious proper band. This feels like a serious step forward for the band, it is is there within richly detailed sound, the careful attention paid, the effervescence of their elephant, feeling oh so elegant, no nothing like that but effervescence is another word in there with the knowingness of the gorgeousness and the delight in the easy going details. Some of it almost is easy listening, almost.
“The goal was to work differently, which is the goal we have every time we work on a new album—to build something in a new way,” Robert explains. “This time, we took our time.” And so in the summer of 2020, Corridor’s members—Robert, vocalist/bassist Dominic Berthiaume, drummer Julien Bakvis, and multi-instrumentalist Samuel Gougoux—holed away in a cottage to engage in the sort of creative experimentation that would lead to Mimi’s ultimate creation. “We went there to write, and a lot of ideas came from that retreat,” Berthiaume explains. “We didn’t end up with songs as much as we did ideas, so the result is a collage of the ideas.”
After that productive session together, Corridor continued to tinker with the songs’ raw parts digitally and remotely over the next few years, with co-producer Joojoo Ashworth (Dummy, Automatic) lending their own specific talents in the theoretical booth. The process was a byproduct of not having access to their previous rehearsal space as the COVID-19 pandemic faded from public view, but also a result of the four-piece leaning harder into incorporating electronic textures than on previous records.
“For a long time, we identified as a guitar-oriented band, and the goal of making this whole record was trying to get away from that,” Berthiaume states while admitting that the band encountered their own challenges as a result: “We had to figure out how to make new songs without having the chance to play together. It was complicated sometimes.” Berthiaume also describes Mimi – which, fun fact, is also named after Jonathan’s cat – as a record about “getting older” and “figuring out new parts of life”—but despite any claims of transitional growing pains from the band, Mimi is a record bursting with new energy and life, a vibrance that’s owed in no small part to Gougoux joining the band full-time after pitching in on live performances in the past.
“I come more from a background of electronic music, so it was nice to involve that with the band more,” he explains, and Mimi contains a distinct rhythmic pulse reminiscent of classic era-post-punk’s own melding of dance and rock textures. Over bright, chiming guitars and ascending synths, Robert addresses his looming mortality on “Mourir Demain”: “I wrote it when my girlfriend and I were shopping for life insurance,” he laughs. With our little daughter growing up, we also considered making our will. I said to myself, ‘Oh shit, from now on I’m slowly starting to plan my death.”
But why is the cat called Mimi? John’s mum? Back to the album, and Knowing is still the word, it is a delight, every bit of it but then there’s Mourir Demain and for that track alone Mimi is well worth the admission price, that track has been on our playlists for months now, that one really is expansive, that one really is widescreen. Hey look, Mimi is a gorgeous album, blissful, a beautifully detailed album, a delight, every bit of it, wrong to pick tracks out…. Knowing. (sw)
The album is out on April 26th. There’s some UK dates coming up
Wed. May 15 – Leeds – Hyde Park Book Club
Thu. May 16 – London – Shacklewell Arms (Free Show – details here)
Fri. May 17 – Brighton, UK – The Great Escape Festival (Green Door Stage)
Fri. May 17 – Brighton, UK – The Great Escape Festival (The Mucky Duck)
Sat. May 18 – Brighton – The Great Escape Festival (Patterns)
THE ORGAN 