Listen New Track “Triggers”
Haitian-Canadian Mélissa Laveaux is a self-assured artist that combines folk, indie pop and her signature percussive finger-style blues guitar for a style that is both sophisticated and sweet.
“I always thought of Emily Dickinson as a wise poet for being able to concisely convey overwhelming sentiments,” Laveaux said of the influences on her new EP, Memory Is A Strange Bell. “The exercise of carefully culling a handful of songs together into an EP was no easy feat. I aimed for both ends of the spectrum, my happiest and my darkest neatly tucked in between verses.”
Laveaux easily admits it: she listens to much more music than she writes. This fills her songs with a thousand different nuances and influences. Pop hits perfectly poised between organic and synthetic sounds (the striking Triggers and Generous Bones), the psychedelic afrorock Postman, and a marvelous acoustic track, ethereal and swaying, snuck its way at the end of the EP.
Sung in Creole, Pie Bwa is a variation on Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, written from the point of view of the blood-stained tree. Containing powerful imagery, modern orchestrations, catchy melodies and intimate prose, Memory Is A Strange Bell simultaneously touches the heart, the mind and the core.
Pittsburgh Music Magazine 