CQAF 2025

Six years after their last studio album, Taylor Kirk’s Canadian band Timber Timbre finally releases a new record, “Lovage”- his most accomplished and engrossing album to date.

“Lovage” is an album marrying perverted piano ballads and spiritual jazz interludes on islands of exotica and psyche-prog with Spectoresque girl-group cabaret. Recorded in 2022 in Quebec with Mike Dubue (Hilotrons), the album features Olivier Fairfield (Fet Nat, Andy Shauf) and members of the Voices of Praise gospel choir (Howe Gelb).

Since releasing and extensively touring “Sincerely, Future Pollution” (2017), Taylor Kirk has been busy working as a producer on several full-length LP’s, including Joseph Martone’s “Honeybirds” and the sophomore recording “Nightshades” by This Lonesome Paradise.

Timber Timbre have quietly released two cassette-only EP’s, “I Am Coming To Paris” and “The Dissociation Tapes Volume1”. Finally returning with a new full-length entitled “Lovage,” the most accomplished and engrossing Timber Timbre album to date. Which isn’t to say that Taylor Kirk has merely refined his working methods. In fact, “Lovage” is a bona fide masterpiece, as Kirk manages to combine disparate influences that would otherwise seem mutually incompatible.

Together with producer-engineer Michael Dubue, he reconciles Brian Wilson’s rich sonic palette with the amused melancholy of Leonard Cohen. Kirk admits to revisiting Sun Ra, Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane, as well as Italian singers such as Pino Daniele and Paolo Conte, which might explain the cinematic lightness of the new album.

Kirk returned to his native Ontario in 2019 after spending a few years in Quebec and Texas. He made it back just in time to sit out the Covid pandemic and regroup. “I moved back to Ontario where I had grown up, a place I left 20 years ago and swore I’d never return to. ‘Holy Motors’ is an homage to this place I love and hate-but also love to hate,” he says of the town where he spent the lockdown. “But it’s a good place to be trapped”.

One could say the same of the sonic landscapes he evokes on “Lovage”. It’s a wonderful album to be trapped on, a modern masterpiece for troubled times one will find oneself returning to again and again.