Elsiane is an international duo (made up of Peruvian singer/instrumentalist Elsieanne Caplette, and Canadian drummer Stephane Sotto), blending orchestral and electronic musical elements with Elsieanne's unique vocal palette to create an intriguing blend of faux-Scandinavian art pop and classic chillout trip-hop.
Let's go ahead and get the obvious comparison out of the way. Elsieanne's voice most closely resembles Bjork. Not simply for her tonal range and strained English diction, but also just the unique and off-kilter way it's used as a twisting and winding instrument. Her voice is not simply a lyric delivery vehicle, backing up and spitting out rhymes, but it's the whole contextual core of their sound. Apart from her voice, the music is very nice but typical.
With it, the result becomes a category unto itself. You really have to hear it, as it involves the combination of childlike soprano, aboriginal throat tones, jazz vocal gymnastics, and "studio-like" edit effects (although it's actually all done naturally, giving the effect that her vocals have been manipulated in post). Stephane's rhythmic bed to the dervish, combined with Elsieanne's keyboards and orchestrations, help highlight the unique fusion that they bring.
But the above description might be misleading without a word about how accessible everything really is. Musically, the duo take a very steady mid-tempo approach to orchestral trip-hop, for lack of a better genre description. The tracks are very melodic and laid back, and have all the urgency of a glass of wine. The lack of variety or dynamic arc to the album might be a concern if it weren't all so consistently nice. It never comes across as monotonous or treading water. On the contrary, the consistency is what gives it a magical cohesion. It never disrupts the buzz.
On the orchestral side, tracks such as the opener "Vaporous" and it's follow-up "Mend (To Fix, To Repair)" help center the sound to a very lush background for Elsieanne's unique vocal delivery, as do the tracks "Morphing" and "Final Escape." "Across The Stream" delivers more of a Portishead vibe, with a drum-centric groove as the key underpin, and "Prozaic" shifts pace slightly to a smokey jazz-lounge shuffle. Things end with the title track "Hybrid", a very complementary track to the style explored throughout the record.
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