Yves Jarvis - The Same But By Different Means [LP]

Yves Jarvis is a recasting of Montreal-based musician Jean-Sebastian Audet. Audet previously created under the name Un Blonde. Each aspect of Audet’s work is immensely personal, and Yves Jarvis reflects this literally. Yves is Audet’s middle name, while Jarvis is his mother’s last name. His music is idiosyncratic neither by design or by chance; it just is. It mutates and shifts, as he does, through cycles and phases. Yves Jarvis’ new record, The Same But By Different Means, is a new cycle. With The Same But By Different Means, Audet continues to create music that is at once warm, haunting, and unfamiliar while remaining singularly inviting and kind—a mélange that reflects both comfort and its counterpart. Un Blonde’s 2017 LP Good Will Come To You was celebrated universally for those things that make Audet’s work compelling: careful folk noir, tender R&B flourishes, pillowy vocal beds that somehow seem to neither begin nor end, and a punkish ambivalence towards saccharine melodics that traditionally dominate the previous three structures. Asked for a message he hopes his listeners receive, Audet simply says, “I really have to ask: talking or listening? That’s all I want to ask with anything I do now, I think. It’s this spectrum and it’s this dichotomy that I’m interested in exploring. Both sides of everything, and everything in between.” Jean-Sebastian Audet presents Yves Jarvis. The same, but by different means.