NEW ALBUMS

Anything Can’t Happen TELEPHONE EXPLOSION 8/10

Sun-lit folk illuminates emotionally honest and hopeful breakup album. 

By Erin Osmon

MIRIAM PAAS

WITH Anything Can’t Happen, Canadian singer, songwriter and multiinstrumentalist Dorothea Paas has crafted one of the most stirring and emotionally resonant break-up albums of recent years, a candid retelling of heartache that doesn’t weaponise pain but instead embraces such darkness as a necessary pairing with light.

A veteran of the Canadian DIY and experimental music scenes, Paas has worked with artists such as US Girls, Jennifer Castle and Badge Époque Ensemble. But this album marks her own studio debut proper, a decade into her career as a self-releasing live performer. Its maturity is unmistakable, demonstrating an evident consideration of instrumental texture, vocal delivery and narrative flow that is restrained and compelling on both micro and macro levels. It’s satisfying to zoom in on each note, to drink in the weight of her feeling as Paas sustains one word over three or four beats, like a condor riding a wind current. But pulling back reveals an equally satisfying connection, where unvarnished emotion melds with aural textures to form a beautiful, devastating and empowering journey.

“I’m not lonely now/Doing all the things I want and working on my mind,” she offers during “One”, the 30-second album opener sung over spare electric guitar. This vignette portends her journey through the album’s nine songs, a suite of tender ruminations on love, trust, self-doubt and broken relationships that culminates in a reclamation of self. It’s a stunning portrait of a woman deep in those throes, who navigates a long path to healing and acceptance, to the idea that she controls her destiny. “Sorting through old thoughts/ I go through them/One…” she concludes, embracing her singular self as a statement of purpose, less a confession than a revelation, a realisation that being alone is better than being with agony.

The album wades through matters of the heart with an intense focus, a lyrical theme that echoes Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Hejira-era portraits, and Elliott Smith’s trenchant reflections, emotionally weighty but easy to take in. And like the later work of those artists, the music of Anything Can’t Happen signals an evolution from a simple folk music foundation to fleshed-out textural arrangements with a cast of accomplished players. Paas recruited friends from the Canadian experimental scene, and the instrumentation throughout seems like a natural collaboration and extension of long-forged relationships and mutual appreciation. Paas’s diaphanous voice is easily compared to Mitchell’s but she often infuses her singing with a subtle vibrato more redolent of Mimi Parker of Low, alternately warm and chilling.