Faith Healer - The Hand That Fits the Glove (2023)

Faith Healer quietly crystallizes on their new album The Hand That Fits The Glove, reshaping their already approachable pop sound into something even more immediate and invigorating. With their 2017 album Try ;-), the duo of Jessica Jalbert and producer/multi-instrumentalist Renny Wilson began stripping away some of the '60s chamber pop influences that had informed the earliest Faith Healer material, and these eight new songs continue expanding outward in new directions. It's a multi-colored assortment of richly-detailed songwriting that feels surprisingly straightforward, knowingly concealing its complexities always just beneath a sheen of composed cool. The core Faith Healer duo expands their membership for the first time on The Hand That Fits The Glove, inviting additional musicians into the picture and filling out the sound with a live band feel. Players from various intersections of Canada's indie circles played on the album. Jalbert and Wilson worked intermittently with different personnel in different settings, meticulously refining songs over time until they were dialled in with precision. The end result is an album that flows effortlessly and remains refreshing and bright even when gliding over rough emotional edges. Waves of airy synths and understated shifts in arrangement steadily build on "The Game," pushing along the song's insistent hooks as it grows into a woozy sparkle. Some of the soft psychedelia of the band's earlier work resurfaces on tracks like the pulsating glow of "I'm A Dog," the tripped out rocking of "Stranger," or the distant groove of "Green Velvet," with the live band playing adding a breathable, open-air quality to deftly architected song construction. The overpoweringly catchy "Another Fool" presents one of the most controlled examples of Faith Healer's perfectly metered sound, bringing together the smooth atmospheres of Montreal chill with the less aloof but equally sophisticated breeziness of late-'90s lounge pop acts like Saint Etienne or the Cardigans.