Yves Jarvis, will release his new album, All Cylinders, on February 28th via In Real Life, along with the news, the artist has shared a video for its title track. The way “All Cylinders” eases-in is like the ideal beginning or ending for a day. A cymbal hit; an enveloping folk-chorale; then the title track’s easy-going shuffle, a driving-song by way of Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach. “10 and 2 down Highway 3 / I’m headed home / I’m headed east,” Jarvis coos. “An expression of faith as I barrel towards fate. RIYL: Speeding through a rainstorm without windshield wipers, Dionne Warwick, Judee Sill, Norah Jones, Marvin Gaye,” explains Yves, of the title track.

“It’s all the same sh*t,” he says. “They all stem from core things.” Jarvis is an omnivore, and All Cylinders smashes together a stunning array of influences: Serge Gainsbourg, Judee Sill, Sheryl Crow, Captain Beefheart, Jackson Browne, Throbbing Gristle, Ray Charles, Brian Eno, Fleetwood Mac.

On the genesis of the album Jarvis explains: “I basically only listened to Frank Sinatra for a year. I wanted Sinatra’s clarity—the way the songs exist without him, as real things. And he’s the interpreter.” Whereas Jarvis had previously approached music as something sculptural—as compositions that emerge spontaneously from raw sonic material—”this time I just made a ton of songs,” he says: “I had tunes stuck in my head. I had choruses. I had actual parts. Instead of making a world, I thought: ‘I’m a band. The drums are there to keep the beat.’

The goal became to articulate these songs as purely and as simply as possible. At home, in the studio, at subletted apartments in Montreal and L.A.—he’d roll out of bed and get straight to work, plugging his gear into a half-broken laptop. Whereas once he had fetishized analog tape, the idea of “using magnetic dust as a medium,” now Jarvis appreciates the value of working without any such preciousness: much of All Cylinders was recorded on bare-bones Audacity, sans plugins, “no pretense, no self-indulgence, music for the sake of music,” channelling the spirit of Paul McCartney’s II. “I feel like this is the least contrived thing I’ve ever done,” Jarvis declares. Lyrics that matter. Vocals up front, where people will actually hear them. “If something’s true to you,” he explains, “it’s probably true to a million other people.”

Yves Jarvis
All Cylinders
Tracklist

1. With A Grain
2. Gold Filigree
3. One Gripe
4. Decision Tree
5. I’ve Been Mean
6. I’m Your Boy
7. Warp And Woof
8. All Cylinders
9. The Knife In Me
10. Patina
11. Luck’s Last Luster

Pre-order/save All Cylinders by Yves Jarvis HERE