PS I Love You

“I wish this summer was my last summer,” warbles PS I Love You frontman Paul Saulnier on the glorious fuzzbath that is “Future Dontcare,” his cracking, Tom Verlaine-esque chirp engulfed in radiant, distorted waves of electric guitar, firing sparks off Benjamin Nelson’s ricocheting snare rolls. “I wish this weekend was my last weekend.”

Death Dreams, the Canadian indie-rock duo’s second album, is—fittingly—consumed by darkness. Their noisy, gleeful, lo-fi debut, 2010’s Meet Me at the Muster Station, was a sleeper smash in their home country, shortlisted for a Polaris Prize and cemented by rave reviews from the Pitchfork crowd. But on their first major tour, Saulnier found himself haunted by his own mortality, plagued by, yes, literal “death dreams.” There’s a midnight-black cloud hanging over PS I Love You’s thrilling sophomore LP, and it extends beyond the often debilitating lyrics. First and foremost, the guitars are nastier, gnarlier, heavier—drilling into your temple with mesmerizing drone one second, consoling with wondrous waves of wah-wah the next. And where Meet Me at the Muster Station offered the occasional flirtation with pop, Death Dreams is miles from melodic, Saulnier’s choked, octave-cracking yelp threatening to implode amidst the pulverizing thunder.

At its breathtaking peaks, Death Dreams is the Indie-Rock Record of the Year, doing for 2012 what Cymbals Eat Guitars did for 2011 with their mind-blowing (and equally dark) Lenses Alien. “Sentimental Dishes” is power-pop drowning in paint-peeling guitar static—the album’s lone venture into catchiness, punctuated by a blistering, finger-tapped guitar solo that threatens to explode your speakers. On “Don’t Go,” random “Great Gig in the Sky”-styled backing vocals waft over miles and miles of gorgeous reverb guitar chime, Saulnier whining himself hoarse like Robert Smith in an insane asylum.

For all the ugliness, all the bitterness, all the fear and regret, Death Dreams can be devastatingly beautiful—most often when Saulnier shuts the hell up and leaves space for his guitar. There’s a reason the folks at Spin recently slapped his name on their “100 Greatest Guitarists” list: His amazing counterpoint wah-wah solo toward the end of “Red Quarter” would be the year’s finest guitar moment thus far if he hadn’t topped himself with a flat-out amazing burst of bluesy psychedelia on album standout “First Contact.” Then there’s the opening title track, an artful squall of white noise, cymbal splash and possessed guitar leads—all inspired by a melody (played by a “death march band”) Saulnier heard in a nightmare.

Quibbles can be made: While Saulnier is a captivating vocalist, the whole “voice cracking at the end of every single vocal phrase” thing gets old quickly, distracting from some otherwise engaging (if overly simple) melodies. And a few tracks (the shapeless “Toronto,” the skippable “Death Dreams II”) get by more on noise than song—a damn shame when the players are this strong. But it’s tough to complain when the rest is this arresting.

“Do you remember first contact? / 2010?,” Saulnier sings on “First Contact,” seemingly referencing his own band. Though there may be a few who can’t remember their first contact with PS I Love You, nobody who makes contact this time will likely forget. - Paste Magazine

Named after The Beatles’ first ever B-side, PSI?U fit in the now firmly established line of loud’n’powerful drummer’n’singer/guitarist combos. Here, aside from an introductory impersonation of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’ (on the title track), they continue where their 2010 debut left off: ie sounding quite a lot like Tom Verlaine fronting Dinosaur Jr (or on ‘Princess Towers’, having-a-tune-era Sonic Youth). When they really wail – see the last minute of ‘Sentimental Dishes’ – it’s exciting. When they take their foot off the gas/distortion pedal – ‘Don’t Go’. ‘How Do You’ – it’s approaching being beautiful. Only the playing-to-type sludge-rockers are a problem. - NME

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Album Review: PS I Love You – Death Dreams

By Gilles LeBlanc on May 9th, 2012 in Album Reviews, Hot

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Our rating:
???½?

If you follow @psiloveyouband for any length of time on Twitter, you’ll quickly realize that PS I Love You singer/guitarist (as well as chief tweeter) Paul Saulnier is a pretty big fan of The Simpsons, and he isn’t above throwing out the odd quote. He’ll probably appreciate this oldie then, from the episode where Homer designs his own car, bankrupting his long-lost half-brother in the process. Before the Danny DeVito-voiced Herb Powell has the chance to call it a “monstrosity,” Homer describes his car in its introductory commercial as “powerful like a gorilla, yet soft and yielding like a Nerf ball.”

While Saulnier and drummer-in-arms Benjamin Nelson probably didn’t have this in mind as they were recording their newest album, Death Dreams, the line above sums up the 11-track effort as well as any 140-character-or-less TwitReview. In a short amount of time, PS I Love You have become renowned for their musical ferocity, especially live, and it’s not like they intended to let up here. There is, however, an underlying sense of overwhelming emotion that is much more present than on 2010’s Meet Me at the Muster Station. Saulnier has admitted that the title refers to recurring visions that he had on tour of his own life ending early.

It is against this somewhat morbid and depressing backdrop that listeners are welcomed with opener “Death Dreams”, an eerie and ominous instrumental dominated by Nelson’s cymbals like wind chimes in a howling storm. When Saulnier does come in, it is sparse, haunting, and teasing; his guitar squeal near the end foreshadows what’s to come. The next song, “Sentimental Dishes”, leaps out of the freshly dug grave, sounding raw and unprocessed in terms of studio chicanery, but with a poppy awareness that makes it about as mainstream and commercially viable as you’re going to get from them.

At this stage of his career at least, Saulnier is a far superior guitar player than lyric writer, and if Death Dreams suffers anywhere, it’s in this area. He effectively conveys the sense of despair the album title suggests with lines like “worst of my life” in “Don’t Go”, “suddenly I’m very afraid” (from “Princess Towers”), and “take me someplace nicer” (“Red Quarter”), but we strain to properly hear them amongst the amplified instrumentation. And the words “all I ever wanted” appear on no less than three separate songs, often accompanied by bestial yelping. “First Contact” at the end is a bit of a surprise in that everything comes together beautifully. It’s almost as if it took him 10 songs to gain enough confidence to say, “When I let you touch me,” which he pulls off with a –dare I say country-ish?– boogie-woogie vibe. It’s a good last impression that there’s more to Saulnier than mere face-melting.

But have no fear, there’s plenty of that. It’s stressful (“Toronto”), frantic (“How Do You Do”), and charmed with pure headbanging gold (“Princess Towers”). Last summer, Saulnier treated himself to a new double-neck guitar, and he’s put it to good use, cutting loose with wailing solos that plow through much of Death Dreams, offering a dense, heavier sound. Some tracks like “Don’t Go” border on thrash metal; although, at one point, there is a shift to a more traditional indie rock moaning. These transitions do get a little messy in places, and what’s worse, Saulnier’s singing doesn’t always keep up with the pace he and Nelson set. When it works, however, it’s more complex and experimental than the simplistic garage rock they’ve been associated with previously.

Death Dreams isn’t all banging and clanging, as suggested by the aforementioned Nerf ball quote. There’s an underrated vulnerability that’s been exposed here, which makes for a valuable listen. At face value, it’s a sophomore album that’s a little tangled, but there’s something admirable about that. Saulnier took a risk, dug real deep emotionally, and got a little lost in the process – but, when you get down to it, doesn’t everyone?

Homer’s car may have been a bust, but this sure isn’t. Roll down your windows and crank it. - Consequence Of Sound

All of Canadian Indiedom has been abuzz over PS I Love You for so many moons now that there was the very real threat the Kingston duo’s debut album would pale in comparison to the hype.

This is a good one, though, pretty much fat-free and an album that actually gets better as it goes on. A real grower, to boot. Everything, in other words, that a debut album should be, and one that has going for it the added good fortune that it will remind dozens of music critics of a certain age of the American guitar bands they worshiped during the ’90s. Passionate press is almost assured. Don’t be surprised if Meet Me at the Muster Station becomes the next homegrown indie-rock record to find its way into the record bags of cool kids on both sides of the Atlantic.

If you’ve caught the live show, you know that PS I Love You is a titanic presence for just two guys, a guitar and a drum kit. That presence makes the transition from stage to studio remarkably well here. Paul Saulnier’s voice — a weird, bug-eyed hillbilly yelp that takes some getting used to but always adds an extra layer of hysteria to the frenzied musical proceedings — usually sounds slightly remote, dwarfed by the enormous sounds cascading around him. The red-lining mix, meanwhile, exudes such electric energy you might as well be at a gig, anyway. When Saulnier slams another pedal down and winds into his next thick-trunked, but impossibly supple guitar riff, you feel it in your chest. His parts sound positively cataclysmic on “2012,” which was probably the point but worthy of note, anyway, because they really sound cataclysmic.

At home, you’ve also got time to appreciate the subtleties in PS I Love You’s unsubtle sound, most of which have to do with the superb level of musicianship that goes into each one of these three-storey-high tunes. Saulnier’s solos rip into J Mascis territory on “Breadends” and “Facelove,” but his repertoire of gobsmacking, ultra-fuzzed-out tones is every bit as impressive as his technical abilities. The guitar never stands still.

Yet without Benjamin Nelson’s locked-on, Stephen Morris-worshipping presence behind it, it wouldn’t wield half the power. Nelson’s dexterous, ever-morphing drumming is the engine that drives PS I Love You’s intense, anxious anthems into white-knuckle territory. It’ll be interesting to see what these boys do when they slow down a bit, but for now going for broke every single minute is working for them very nicely indeed.

Top Track: “Get Over.” The album’s penultimate track might be its best. The riffs are steel cables, the rhythm rather difficult to ignore. And dig the ska break! - Toronto Star

This is a duo in which the third member is sheer noise, and for whom the Pixies and The Replacements are The Beatles and the Stones. Where that debut described the band's Kingston, Ontario home, Death Dreams takes inspiration from life on the road and Saulnier's titular nightmares, subject of the two unsettling instrumentals that punctuate the album. No Wonder those vocals sound so tortured. 4 STARS. - Q Magazine (In Print)

Canadian noise-rock duo PS I Love You released their sophomore album ‘Death Dreams’ earlier this month. The band, comprised of Benjamin Nelson and Paul Saulnier, formed in 2006 and are signed to Paper Bag Records.

Album opener ‘Death Dreams’ is an instrumental track which really sets the tone for the rest of the album. These two have honed their craft, a statement cemented by this album. There is a clear style that works for them and it flows through the record perfectly, but they’re so experimental with sound that each track shows a lot of diversity.

Third track ‘Don’t Go’ is the leading single and definitely one of the strongest on the LP with amazing crescendo. ‘Death Dreams II’ offers a second little instrumental break for us to gather our thoughts, while ‘Princess Towers’ feels like the weaker of the tracks and seems to drift on a bit without the craftsmanship of the others.

All in all, ‘Death Dreams’ takes us on a ride of thrashy, ballsy rock tunes which definitely makes me want to go and see them live! If they can convey such energy through their recording then who knows what they’re capable of creating in a live atmosphere. - Hit The Floor Magazine (UK)

A Canadian drums’n’guitars duo, pasting their melodic indie stomp with claustrophobic scuzz… ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Japandro – oh! On the surface, it’s pretty easy to draw comparisons between Vancouver’s finest and PS I Love You, but there’s more to the latter than you might expect. For starters, there’s the way Paul Saulnier’s strangulated yelp donates a frantic energy to ‘Don’t Go’’s deafening slop, whilst the squalling workout of ‘First Contact’ leans jubilantly towards axe heroism. This second album is exciting rather than essential, but if it’s blown-out ears you want, PS I Love You oblige in style. - The Fly

hey get tons of love from taste-making publications like Pitchfork, and Spin magazine just listed Saulnier as the 99th-best guitarist of all time. They made a huge impact with their debut, and their sophomore effort, Death Dreams, is bigger, better and already getting the kind of buzz other bands would kill for. - Now Magazine

Death Dreams is a pivotal second album, a rare accomplishment in an age when most artists struggle to be relevant after their debut. Whereas Muster was written entirely by Saulnier, this one was a band effort, and Rogalsky's full, spacious production undermined any suggestions to make it sound "shitty." The '90s alt-rock comparisons will undoubtedly end, and talk of PS I Love You as sonic warriors will begin. - Exclaim Magazine

of All Time
May 3 2012, 8:45 AM ET
by SPIN Staff
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Nick Zinner / Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic Nick Zinner / Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

To celebrate the new generation of shredders profiled in our May/June "Loud Issue," the SPIN staff decided to find some wheedle in a haystack, taking on the impossible task of ranking our favorite guitar players of all time. Traditionally, the "greatest guitarist" timeline begins with Robert Johnson magically conjuring the blues, nears perfection with Eric Clapton mutating it beatifically, and then ultimately reaches a boomer-baiting Rock and Roll Hall of Fame apotheosis with the free-spirited Jimi Hendrix shooting it into space like feedback-laden fireworks. For this list, we veer toward the alternative canon that kicks in with the Velvet Underground trying to erase that form entirely, making guitar solos gauche and using instruments as sadomasochistic tools for hammering out sheets of white heat.

As you will see, our list embraces outsiders, trailblazers, outliers, and Eugene Chadbourne playing a rake. We don't worship "guitar gods," but prefer our axe-wielders to be resourceful, egalitarian, flawed, and human. We're not drawn to Olympic feats of fleet-fingered athletics, unless they're used for unique and exploratory ends. We see the mewling histrionics of Jeff Beck as tyranny instead of catharsis. The name Derek Trucks is practically alien to us.

But maybe we're overthinking all this. Shut up 'n play yer guitar! CHRISTOPHER R. WEINGARTEN
100 SKRILLEX

Look, as far as we know, our asymmetrically coiffed party pal has never held a guitar in his life. But no contemporary musician has a more primal understanding of adrenaline-pumping, pulse-raising, chest-caving bulldozer riffs than dubstep mosh ambassador Skrillex. Somewhere between the unfiltered piston-pumps of nü-metal and the twinkling emocore melodies that weaned him is a gaping sarlacc of yawping melodies and buzzsaw edges. The bass drop to "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" might just be this generation's "Smoke on the Water" — look no further than the obscene number of "Skrillex guitar cover" videos on YouTube!
?Most Heroic Moment: Korn's "Get Up," even if Munky technically plucked the strings. CHRISTOPHER R. WEINGARTEN
Paul Saulnier / Photo by Getty ImagesPaul Saulnier / Photo by Getty Images
99 Paul Saulnier (PS I Love You)

In SPIN's May/June "Loud Issue," Paul Saulnier, frontman for squawking indie-punx PS I Love You, mused, "I'm getting comfortable with self-indulgence." Hopefully, not too comfortable: Saulnier's yelping guitar-driven blurts cast him as a Clark Kent too shy to ever fully embrace his Superman side. Endearingly knock-kneed riffs lurch along with their heads down before briefly unbuttoning their shirts to reveal the brawny licks underneath. Virtuosity is rarely so endearingly bashful.
Most Heroic Moment: Two minutes into "Butterflies and Boners," when a thick haze of distortion lifts and the cascading finger-tapped section begins. - Spin Magazine

PS I Love You, the '90s indie loving duo from Kingston, Ontario, have announced their sophomore album, Death Dreams, for release on May 8 via Paper Bag Records. The album is sure to boast some of the fuzziest, buzziest tracks in indie rock since the band's last album, 2010's great Meet Me at the Muster Station.

I realize that PS I Love You aren't that well-known but they've been one of my faves since I saw them at M for Montreal more than a year ago. They were even featured in our Playing on Prefix column over at KCRW. - Prefix Magazine

Guitarist and singer Paul Saulnier, one half of the Ontario duo PS I Love You, waves his rock fanboy flag so proudly he all but dares listeners to snicker at his sincerity. Saulnier sings with a quiver that fulcrums between countrymen Spencer Krug and Geddy Lee, and mixes and matches Alex Lifeson’s busybody fretwork and Thurston Moore’s blissful dissonance with little concern for the aesthetic barricades between Rush and Sonic Youth fans. But Saulnier’s Guitar Center theatrics aren’t even the least cool element of PS I Love You’s sophomore album, Death Dreams, or the most artistically brave. His lyrics flaunt his depression and fear as boldly as “Princess Towers” flaunts his guitar god aspirations; even when Saulnier and drummer Benjamin Nelson lock in to a Cheap Trick-worthy strut on “Sentimental Dishes,” it feels like he’s harnessing the power of classic-rock archetypes to shore himself up to face his doubts. - AV Club

On May 8, Ontario's yelping guitar heroes PS I Love You will release Death Dreams via Paper Bag, the follow-up to 2010's Meet Me at the Muster Station. The band has already let go two tracks from the album: "Sentimental Dishes" and "Princess Towers". Now, check out "Don't Go". - Pitchfork

Last year, Ontario noise-pop duo PS I Love You released the rarities compilation Figure It Out, which followed up 2010's immensely fun debut LP, Meet Me at the Muster Station. On May 8,Paper Bag will release that LP's proper follow-up, Death Dreams. The expectedly bashing "Sentimental Dishes" is the second track on the album. - Pitchfork

Kingston’s PS I love you is a duo riding a good wave of buzz for their debut EP, and is considered one of the hottest acts at the fest. They certainly didn’t disappoint. Paul Saulnier is evidently an awesome guitarist, kicking up the fuzz and feedback, but tempered with a good does of melody, filling things out while singing and also playing the bass pedal organ, while backed by excellent drummer Benjamin Nelson. It was their first performance of a few this weekend, and showed why this is one hot act you should definitely try to catch. - Toronto Star

As the nostalgia for bullshit '80s dance music seems to be subsiding for a re-appreciation of'90s gritty angst, PS I Love You have emerged at the perfect time. Live, Saulnier is an overwhelming musical force; his sensitive brute vocals are bolstered by ridiculously great guitar shredding. In its Pixies/Archers of Loaf domain, "Starfiled" showcases his penchant for snaky pop beauty, while "Butterflies & Boners" is a gorgeous display of layered guitar virtuosity unseen this side of Dinosaur Jr. - Exclaim!

Honest-to-goodness, hard-line indie rock is alive and well in the great white North. "Facelove"-- a ferociously catchy single from Kingston, Ontario, duo PS I Love You-- was the hiding on the B-side of a shared 7" with "All Yr Songs", last fall's Best New Music-approved track from Toronto's Diamond Rings. Sorry we didn't catch the flipside sooner. "Facelove" is a towering tribute to art of the build, helmed by juicy, punched-up guitar work that demands to be felt (if not just plain gawked at). - Pitchfork

The coolest two-piece in Canada isn’t from Vancouver, Montreal or even Parkdale. They reside in the university town of Kingston and shred like Yngwie Malmsteen. Comprised of two former frenemies with “a quiet, cool, dude thing going on,” PS I Love You formed after the dissolution of singer/guitarist Paul Saulnier and drummer Benjamin Nelson's previous four-piece, Magic Jordan. Though Saulnier used to play his frenetic ragers solo with multiple Casios, a drum machine, bass organ, four amps and a guitar, he’s happy for the new addition. - EYE Weekly