Esmerine is a group of Montreal multi-instrumentalists with sonic and historical ties to peers like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Set Fire to Flames, and Thee Silver Mt. Zion, and with a virtual universe of sounds in their arsenal. On their seventh album, core members Rebecca Foon, Bruce Cawdron, and Brian Sanderson blur the lines between indie rock, neo-classical, jazz, and post-whatever with nine instrumental tracks that sweep, soar, float, and shimmer in a vast and often melancholy soundscape. Delicate piano melodies (played variously by all three members) anchor many of the tracks, with Foon’s cello, Cawdron’s marimba, and Sanderson’s violin and guitar embellished by new member Philippe Charbonneau’s bass; other tracks feature cornet, flugelhorn, sousaphone, mellotron, glockenspiel, vibraphone, drums, and percussion, plus the Asian hulusi flute, African ngoni guitar, and atmospheric field recordings of rainfall and insects. Although that suggests something massive and cacophonous, every instrument seems to add the right amount of colour and tone and fits into a cohesive whole, despite the fact that most of the individual performances were recorded separately by the musicians with producer Jace Lasek. Several tracks have mood and tempo shifts: “Entropy: Incantation – Radiance – The Wild Sea,” begins with a gentle cello line and unexpectedly explodes into a rock song with drums and guitars; the juxtaposition of wildlife and marimba gives “Foxtails & Fireflies” a magical-music-box feel; and the gorgeous “Number Stations” envelops the listener in a hypnotic rainy dreamscape. It’s a lovely cloud to float away on.
