The Toronto group set oddball existential queries at the center of a shapeshifting rhythm section, collaging together pop fundamentals with a vast collection of musical knick-knacks.
The rules of nature that keep the world in order can just as easily put it in disarray: The same physics that bring clean water pouring from the kitchen faucet are also responsible for the coffee that slides down the side of the pot and pools on the countertop. A similarly intricate force seems to power Eau de Bonjourno, the third album by Bernice. Under the guidance of bandleader and vocalist Robin Dann, the Toronto group collage together pop fundamentals with musical knick-knacks sourced from a vast palette of synthesizer textures and rhythms that cover every corner of pop and R&B, from lo-fi recordings to the Billboard charts. Like beads of rain dashing across a windshield, Eau de Bonjourno is unusually mesmerizing with its movements, connected by the natural spirit of chaos.
Dann’s spiritual and existential observations lie at the core of the band’s shapeshifting rhythm section. On early highlight “It’s Me, Robin,” she introduces herself in plaintive terms (“I thought if I just expressed this/You might let me be me, and accept that I’m here”), then makes a chorus out of the query, “Who are you?” The question spirals from the listener back to the singer, as the song spreads out into a wide sweep of saxophone and piano. With “Infinite Love,” Bernice sneak a heartfelt endorsement of a radical love ethic into an arrangement that scans like a bedroom-pop sex jam. But when Dann sings about a love that feels “amazing,” she’s not merely addressing earthly bodies—it’s something cosmic, all-encompassing, a connection felt on the atomic level.
Similarly, a song called “Personal Bubble” is less a timely comment on plague-year etiquette than a rarefied invitation to a private world. By the time the novelty of the title starts to erode, the music pivots: a change of rhythm transforms it into a galactic combination of heavily reverbed slap bass, a topsy-turvy sax solo, and a thicker, weirder beat. The record is full of such odd turns, like “Big Mato,” an effervescent expression of vulnerability wrapped in a salad metaphor that takes its title from...a big tomato. Examined piecemeal, the Eau de Bonjourno recipe seems like it shouldn’t work—but it does.
It’s all too easy to apply an “experimental” tag to the type of kinetic, amorphous songs that appear on Eau de Bonjourno and throughout Bernice’s catalog, but the band are no twee tinkerers. Amid the webs of synths, processed guitars, and saxophones, Dann’s writing is intensely focused on the events of the natural world. On “Lone Swan,” she hones in on the titular bird, as well as a beaver gnawing on red bark, a loud waterfall, a hermit thrush building her nest beside a dry riverbed, and a sick maple tree tended by park workers. Though opportunities for quiet communion with nature are fleeting, they are, miraculously, everywhere. It is the contradictions and juxtapositions that make life possible. Eau de Bonjourno takes them in stride, accepting the mess of it all as a benediction.
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