January 30, 2018 — “Deux Cœurs” by Corridor & Halo Maud

Corridor

If you only listen to one song tonight, make it “Deux Cœurs” by Corridor & Halo Maud (2017, from a digital single).

Corridor is a quartet from Montréal. They’re essentially an art-rock band with some post-rock and jangle-pop stylings. They’ve been around since 2013 and have released two albums, including last year’s Supermercado. I had never heard of them until I stumbled upon one of their songs on another blog, and decided that I needed to dig a little deeper into their catalog.
Halo Maud is the stage name of Parisian dream-pop singer/songwriter Maud Nadal. She was in a Paris psychedelic pop band called Moodoid, and she may have played guitar on the still forthcoming sophomore album by Melody’s Echo Chamber. Nadal put out a solo EP called Du Pouvoir last year. I had never heard of her until I started my own research about Corridor.

Maud Nadal

I found this collaboration between these two bands I know nothing about, and I absolutely love it. It combines the angular, bouncy post-punk in the vein of The Dismemberment Plan or Ought with dreamily alluring baby-ish vocals similar to Melody Prochet out of the aforementioned Melody’s Echo Chamber, the late Trish Keenan out of Broadcast, or Jessie Stein out of The Luyas. To a much lesser extent, there are also some bits of the Stereolab brand of krautrock.

I seriously fell in love with this right away:
“Deux Cœurs” by Corridor & Halo Maud

Of course the words are in French, and of course I can’t make heads or tails of them. Only that the title translates to “Two Hearts”. You don’t need to speak French to get that part. There was a time when I could read French well enough to understand the lyrics, but those days are long gone. When I plugged the French lyrics into an auto-translator, it came back with gobbledygook. It doesn’t matter, though. I love this song because of how it sounds.
Corridor brings the sort of math-y and weirdly beautiful angular sounds. Maud Nadal softens the edges quite a bit with her breathy, high-registered cooing. The sticcato bursts of guitar remind me just a little bit of Stereolab.
It all fits together beautifully.

You can buy the digital single via Bandcamp for $1 CAD here. That’s about $0.81 USD by today’s exchange. I have no idea if Corridor and Halo Maud will collaborate again in the future, but I hope so.