Pascale Picard Band - A Letter To No One (2011)

Tracklist

01. Our Christmas Song
02. What We've Got (Jodie)
03. The Gap
04. If I Let You
05. Shooting Star
06. Hide And Seek
07. Nobody's Here To Break Your Heart
08. Raw
09. Hell Is Other People
10. Feeling Better
11. The Right Rhyme (Cats Got My Tongue)
12. Five Minutes
13. A Letter To No One
14. And If I Miss My Shot

Four years after her multi-platinum debut album, Me, Myself & Us, took her native Quebec by storm, landing her a support slot on Paul McCartney's world tour and selling 300,000 copies in the process, singer/songwriter Pascale Picard and her self-titled backing band return with their second effort, A Letter to No One. Produced by Jean-François Lemieux (Daniel Bélanger, Robert Charlebois), its 14 songs show glimpses of her previous organic folk sound, as on the gently plucked acoustic ballads "If I Let You" and "The Right Rhyme (Cat's Got My Tongue)" and the melancholic duet with Franco-Ontarian Damien Robitaille, "Nobody's Here to Break Your Heart." But elsewhere, Picard displays a newfound sense of invention, combining spiky angular riffs with strident military rhythms on the driving "The Gap"; adding a crunching dirty bassline to "Raw," a track that recalls the dictionary swallowing angst-rock of Alanis Morissette's sophomore album; and fusing spacious electronica and gentle Americana on the gorgeous "Five Minutes," which later ends in a flurry of lolloping beats and distorted guitars. Equally enchanting are the convincing forays into Nashville territory, which at times echo the steel pedal-laden alt-country of Minnie Driver's moonlighting efforts ("And If I Miss My Shot"), the Celtic-tinged shuffles of Amy Macdonald ("Feeling Better"), and the thumping hoedowns of KT Tunstall ("Shooting Star"), while the string-soaked Suzanne Vega-esque opener "Our Christmas Song" and reverb-laden dream pop of "Hell Is Other People" reveal her more expansive-sounding capabilities. A Letter to No One still offers the intimacy and emotion of its predecessor, but it's a more layered and textured record that cleverly feels like a natural progression rather than a concerted effort to change a winning formula.

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