“Movies (Softest Version)” by Milk & Bone (Review)
By Caitlin Joy
Cream ivory seashell castles and meadows of the shallows compose the musical world of Milk & Bone. Laurence Lafond-Beaulne and Camille Poliquin began wandering in the lofty hedges and sliding columns of adulthood in the setting sun, still peach golden, in Montreal. Anglophone artists, they stretched their shimmering haze through Soundcloud's digital fibres up the north-east of Quebec and out from the south-west of Ontario. Sentimentality is our sugar: each work is touched with the traces of holiday bliss - oak-wood fireplaces, dark maple candles and iced sugar cookies - and fingers pricked on lily and fern flower crowns.
Little Mourning's (2015) "Pressure" is fluffy dandelion-and-wild daisy-perfumed, "Coconut Water," flying kites into the hearts of springtime clouds and four-leaved clovers, and "Tomodachi (featuring Terrell Morris)," blushing cherries and violet plums of midsummer. Deception Bay's (2018) "Daydream" is pastel lavender-budding skies and pull apart cotton candy clouds and "KIDS," creamy, ivory lace and twinkling sugar plums; "Deception Bay," sugar-sweet strawberry gumdrops and pinkies dipped in vanilla frosting to "BBBLUE's" early spring rose skies' bittersweet lemonade and pearly watermelon crystals. 2022's Chrysalim is the glistening snowflake and wintry Honeycrisp chill of January's wistful sigh ("Bigger Love"), honey-gold maple leaves and thickly vanilla frosted cinnamon buns ("Object of Fun"), and cinnamon-bronzed marshmallows beneath blinking, soon-to-be autumn stars ("A Little Better Every Time").
"Movies" on Chrysalim is warm in Laurence and Camille's hands, a match of early morning violets in bloom and fresh strawberries on the cusp of blooming. The two-piece's last single "Movies (Softest Version)" glides into the sugary language of Milk & Bone's history of soundscapes in turquoise velvet guitar melodies, fluffy as cheesecake and reflective as a pebble skipped on a wishing will. The king pieces, Lafond-Beaulne and Poliquin's backing angels' voices.
Such a heavenly sigh of bedroom pop begins with a grandfatherly clock ticking, basalt hands reaching to caress a listener's cheek. The two women's vocals and the sparse instrumentation are fine shivering strands of silk turning into a web, glued together by molten sugar. Shot ever so often by a careful thunder of apologetically crashing tides. Rhythm is given by the hearty thrumming of a conch shell's shaking, catching and tossing back the light, upon the fragile melody of a row of pearls in a mermaid's comb. The faint whirling wisps of beyond the shores, in the ear of a conch shell ebb and flow. At some times, pearly breaking the surface of the water. There is gentle percussion, yet rich as the salt-crystallized roughness of a starfish, and heavenly fluttering harp strings, shimmering threads in a sliver of light. Chubby sea anemone delicately wiggling fingers, and a fragile satiny fin's caress along a keyboard. Delicate twinkles of lacy kelp, calling home the rocky crags on a precipice, and catching the rushing currents.
Siren choruses like rippling lagoon waves, satiny and delicate in ebbs and flows, and flecked in curling petals of sunlight, ring. Choruses floating with wings outstretched, light as a feather and eyelashes tickling the tops of cheeks, into the heart of the world's waters. Indigo sapphire vocal effects, refracting Seline's silvery drops of dew, layer. "Movies (Acoustic Version)" happens in a bedroom, before the fluttering eyelids of twinkling silver stars show themselves.
Lafond-Beaulne and Poliquin hopelessly trace constellations in the pitch-black sky, next to the beau whose arrow is lodged in the fibres of their hearts. In the faint, frosty glow of a nightlight, in the tremulous, prickling shade of a belladonna's silken leaves, a man lost in the fantasy of the cinema whispers in perfumed gusts, what he wishes for. His yearning for a drive-in movie theatre stolen of its nostalgia by the cruel hands of time. His asking of her reconstruction of white picket fences in bloom at dusk. Their lips, of cracked pomegranate, metallic and bitter as spilled blood, wish this, and him, goodbye. Lafond-Beaulne and Poliquin fight the dawning of fragile, lacy snowflakes. Honouring the frigid, shivering conclusion of such's gradually melting. Beating their overflowing desire to fall headfirst. Announcing oneself to love one's real self now, and for ever after.
The two young women seeking a true, true kind of hearth will flee hand-in-hand to cinnamon gold flecked waters. Returning to life with her giving of her silver-footed dawn breath, Milk & Bone reclaim for themselves, at the ocean's depth.
Listen to "Movies (Softest Version)" on all streaming platforms. Follow @milknbone everywhere online!
