Salsa Cinderella

I'd forgotten how much I love shoegazy noise-pop until I put Femme Accident's "Hum" on heavy rotation the other day. However, turns out there's another Montréal-based band who are also crafting cool guitar-fuelled alternative rock... 

Salsa Cinderella were formed by guitarist and singer-songwriter Nichk Dhan in Paris back in 2010. Relocating to Montréal and augmented by drummer Thibault Vincent and Marion Chanson on bass and vocals, the band released their four-track eponymous EP earlier this year, and have recently expanding to a four-piece with the addition of Nicolas Desse (for yet more noise-pop wondrousness...)

The EP is a heady melange that takes shoegazy guitars, adds both raw punk and dream-pop elements to create a totally addictive sound. It's also an EP of two distinct halves...

Opening with "Nothing comes out of your mouth" and trademark shoegaze droning guitars, the ethereal boy-girl vocals of Nick and Marion float above the guitar-fuelled maelstrom, softening the edges, producing a hypnotic and trance-like state of affairs. "Glad you came to me (Haunted)" features Marion's whispering, ephemeral voice flying solo above raging torrent of reverbed, jangling guitars and metronomic percussion - it would be tempting to list all of the musical influences that spring to mind, but frankly you should know who they are by now and I don't want to distract from what is 3'10" of pure aural pleasure.

It's from here on that things start to get very intriguing. Eschewing vocals, the band create two distinctive instrumentals. "Shut'em down" features yet another  clockwork precision beat - courtesy of Thibault Vincent solid stick-work - over which effects-pedalled guitars are seemingly stacked-up a layer at a time. And while it would be easy to categorise the tune as a "jam",  the repetitive nature of  which (I'm almost tempted to say "loop") is totally hypnotic and you find yourself metaphorically digging down through all the layers. However it's "Dear Reality" that is arguably the EP's pièce de résistance. Added synths and piano ensure that this is not so much an instrumental as orchestral. Proof positive that music does indeed tame the savage beast... 

Salsa Cinderella
EP (Bandcamp, iTunes)