Music/Album Reviews

The Act of Living
Genre: Bedroom-pop meets high-impact-rock
If you like: Florence and the Machine, Fleetwood Mac, carolesdaughter
Best track: Blood!
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should listen: Skye Wallace manages to marry ambitious production choices with down-to-earth lyrics and instrumentation. This is an album full of rough edges, but those snags in production actually add a cool-girl sophistication to the record, making it stand out from the crowd.
NEXT: The Great Hall, Fri. Nov. 1

When singer-songwriter Skye Wallace shows up at Boxcar Social, tucked into a laneway off Markham Street, she’s dressed for an adventure. Wisps of hair peek out from beneath a corduroy baseball cap, and a colourful kerchief around her neck — gifted to Wallace at a music festival in Yellowknife — adds a certain camp counsellor flair to the ensemble.

Indeed, the soft-rock-pop musician, on the cusp of releasing her sixth album, The Act of Living, is ready for anything.

“I was born in Scarborough,” she says, sipping iced coffee. The songwriter has been making music since 2013 and has toured both domestically and internationally with her uniquely homegrown sound. “But we moved every couple of years, me and my family. We kept heading west; I spent some formative years in B.C., then moved back to Toronto about 10 years ago. And now I’m here.”

So is Toronto home for Wallace, then?

“That’s tricky,” she says, gazing into her drink. “My family and I are very close, so home is wherever they are. But a lot of places claim me, which is nice; Sunshine Coast, for instance, and I spent a lot of time in Durham Region growing up — Oshawa, Ajax, that kind of thing. And I’ve never lived on the East Coast, but my family’s from Newfoundland. So, I have beacons of home everywhere, kind of.”

In the absence of a permanent geographical home, says Wallace, is her community. Almost as if on cue, a friend comes to our table to say hi — Steve Foster, a fellow musician. It seems no matter where Wallace goes, a pal won’t be far away.

The Act of Living explores feelings of togetherness — and loneliness — in the context of death. It’s a dark concept for an album, but Wallace has dark experiences to pull from, including a near-fatal car accident and the death of her grandfather, two life experiences she says hugely affected her approach to creating art.

“The whole thing is about my relationship with death,” she explains. “It’s an examining of death and cycles and life. So, some of the songs are very personal to me — they’re about a near-death experience with my mom and ushering my grandfather into whatever comes beyond. It was very intimate and very raw.

“Some songs on the record are intentionally very rickety,” she continues, “with sharp corners and edges. And then some are more universal, things I think we can all relate to and understand.”

What stands out on The Act of Living is Wallace’s experimentation with proximity. On Marrow, the opening track, Wallace plays with reverb, which makes her voice echo against invisible walls with a satisfying bounce. Later, on Dead End, Wallace’s voice sounds closer, sort of, but it’s amplified by stacked harmonies that lend a Florence Welch-style depth to the track.

“We kept some of the vocals from demos,” she shared. “There’s a brittleness you can’t replicate in the studio. We’re really riding the fourth wall, bringing people into the story at different points … I like things with a little nasty quality to them — that’s what makes things human, that kind of imperfection. You find the beauty in little mistakes, in little happy accidents and things. That’s what appeals to me.”

As we chat, Boxcar Social’s soundscape evolves from chaotic jazz to brooding rock. When Wallace gets into the minutiae of The Act of Living, Fruit by Oliver Sim plays over the coffee shop’s speakers, with intermittent flashes of spacey synth.

“The first song I wrote on the record was right after my grandfather had passed,” she shares. “I was really in the process of grief and still very raw about it. I was writing and singing through tears, and that became an integral sound to the track. It felt important to commemorate my grandfather in that way — we were very close.”

Wallace says her relationship with death changed as she continued to dig into the album; feelings of fear ebbed and flowed as she discovered new ways to consider grief and mortality through the hands-on production of the record.

“I realized there was something happening here,” she says. “I started writing songs further generated by that lead of death, and its connection with the body. The thing that shook me out of that state of fear was the notion of death as a cycle or death as change.

“Death doesn’t have to be tangible and horrific, looming over my shoulder,” she reveals. “In fact, one of the last songs I wrote was about the death of anxiety.” Wallace shares that medication for mental health was a game-changer for her, but it brought with it a new sense of dread — about the absence of the very feeling she’d been hoping to assuage.

“Something was missing,” she shares. “You feel empty; it’s an adjustment. So, I wrote this song about my breakup with anxiety. I wanted to get rid of it, but it was still as sad as any breakup — even if you know the relationship isn’t working, it’s always going to be kind of shitty.”

Wallace hits the road this month with 10 or so stops across small-town Ontario and a final show at Toronto’s Great Hall in November. She’s stoked to share the new album with her fans — and to sing these tracks with them on tour.

“I’ve already performed it a few times, but I can’t wait to do my song The Act of Living,” she says. “It’s so sludgey and droney — the initial inspiration was actually drone. It’s about this trudging, exhausted feeling of living in this world that doesn’t make sense — the cognitive dissonance of looking to each other to cope.

“I wanted that existential malaise,” she says. “So, I’ve been touring it, trying stuff out. And that’s actually given me a chance to understand it.” Wallace also filmed a music video for The Act of Living, which she says she can’t wait to share with the world.

“It’s way more beautiful than I thought it was going to be,” she says. “Horror and comedy go so well together because you have that push-pull of tension and relieving the tension and death. It’s all about that.”