Valois

When Valois began in 2013, it was a solo recording project for Charles Hoppner, who released the album Girls that year. That release eventually led to a musical partnership with Megan Miller of And The Kids, which begat Love Dies But You Won’t, Valois’s latest “808 heavy throwback” that blends millennial indie cool with 80s New Romanticism.

The Ottawa, ON based band celebrated the new record’s release with a couple of shows last month, and as of this writing no new shows are scheduled. Love Dies But You Won’t is available for purchase, along with Hoppner’s previous releases, at Vaolis’s Bandcamp. - Quick Before It Melts

We’ve found ourselves to be consistent fans of the work of Charles Valois, but we haven’t heard much from the wonderfully melodramatic pop songwriter since 2013. So we’re very excited to learn that he’s relocated to Ottawa and has been working on a follow up to his 2012 debut album Girls, and has assembled a band and taken a more collaborative approach, even renaming the project to Valois. His second record Love Dies But You Won’t is a lovely short album that delves even further into electronic music, and as you’d expect, we’re down with that. Standout single “Ça Sera” is a heartfelt weird synthpop number that’s super-catchy. Every section is very hooky and you’ll probably humming this one all day. Our favourite song from this talented songwriter yet!

You can listen to or buy Love Dies But You Won’t from Valois on Bandcamp. - Silent Shout

“So Long, Dear” – Valois (Lyrics by Charles Hoppner and Shannon Murray)

Babe you are, to me
The death of all my dreams
A warped record I can’t throw out


From the excellently named album ‘Love Dies But You Won’t’ comes “So Long, Dear”, a song about a poor dude who cannot get over the memory of his lost love. She must have hurt him bad because there is a lot of pain and anger there (“…the site of all my hatred…”). But this isn’t simply a matter of not being able to forget because he still remembers the love he felt. The fact is, he doesn’t want to forget. Why? Because, like the warped record, you can’t throw these things out. All those imperfect, unpleasant, hurtful things are just as much a part of who we are as all the good things. For this guy it’s “A song I can’t stop writing.”

–Mark Anthony Brennan - Grayowl Point

Ride the Tempo is proud to premiere the album ‘Love Dies But You Won’t’ by Valois.

Valois began as a solo project for Ottawa’s Charles Hoppner. ‘Love Dies But You Won’t’ is the culmination of a summer of heartbreak and creativity co-written and produced by And The Kids’ Megan Miller. Starting as a hazy, angsty recording project centred around synths, guitars, and 808’s, it took form as Valois morphed into a live band featuring Shannon Murray and Dan KL. The record features guest appearances from And The Kids’ Hannah Mohan and True Man Show’s Kenneth Antonio. It brings together arts and crafts indie rock, forlorn electronic rhythms, concrete explorations and old-school glam pop. - Ride The Tempo

Ottawa’s Charles Hoppner has evolved Valois from what began as a minimalist songwriting project into a full-band effort featuring Shannon Murray and Dan KL, with production and co-writing from And The Kids’ Megan Miller. The resulting full-length, Love Dies But You Won’t, explores heart-on-sleeve songs delivered in a proto-Napoleon-Dynamite croon, a sort of Violent Femmes folk-punk exercise undercut with simple drum patterns of the kind you’d find built into an Omnichord or vintage Korg Mini Pops unit, toylike blips, blops and loopy electro-zazzle flourishes.

There’s a surfeit of super-quirky vintage glammed-out space capsule pop on hand here, streaked through with a black humour reminiscent of the work of world-weary and wry lyrical output of B.C.’s Prarie Cat. Off-kilter boy-girl harmonies pull the boppy verse grooves of “Ça Sera” and “Lone Wolf” in eccentric, wobbling patterns – the vocal interplay on the latter song splices the deep bassy pads of the instrumentation into satisfying patterns before breaking down into a distorted, affected pseudo-rap section and howling, treble-fuzzy outro. It’s downright weird, for lack of a better word, displaying a madcap combination of obviously exaggerated tinfoil-and-pipe-cleaner aesthetics and straight-arrow, unironic delivery.

“Impasse” mixes distorted squelches and 70s-style sci fi throwback pad washes in what is at first a melancholic drone, accelerating to a swarm of digital insects pulsing and oscillating like some giant Death Star control panel as it whines its way toward full power. You can practically picture Hoppner scrambling at the controls of a massive multi-timbral modular system with patch cords snaking out like nerve cells on every surface. “Hero Dog” morphs a heartbreakingly earnest ballad structure about a faithful companion into a sequence of velour-lined glam punk tapestries in its choruses, all trashy cymbals and high gain soloing.

“Ottawa Love Song” is a cutting, if hilariously adoring, portrait of arrested development and yearning in the artist’s hometown: “I’m from the city that fun forgot / the lost child of the indie scene / bureaucracy is the economy / we don’t have jet planes, we have balconies.” The vintage girl group handclaps, scrawny falsetto, and Moonage Daydream style guitar vamping all tread a deliciously fun pop-camp line. The title track goes for an even more emphatic strike at a Bowie-esque aesthetic, with its reverberating short-gated snare and swishing old-school organ warbles. In the later going of the album, “Elation” works brilliantly as a strung out New Wave pop anthem.

Love Dies But You Won’t may be a love-or-hate listen, depending on your tolerance for the skew of a particular ratio of moments of unbridled digital experimentation to those built on lovingly Frankensteined retro-pop structures. It’s raw and rough around the majority of its edges, but lends itself well to the scratching of a certain, hard-to-reach musical itch. - Grayowl Point

It’s been a little bit since we heard from Charles Valois, but he has returned and he’s taken another big step forward with his new single. The Ghost Districts builds gradually, beginning with pretty synth atmospherics and Valois’s desperate white boy croon until the beat arrives two thirds of the way into the song, heralding a triumphant final minute. The single is available here. Check this guy out. He will make your life better. - Silent Shout

Charles Valois brings together a well-rounded little album. While small in size (under thirty minutes) it manages to be maniac-depressive, at one moment overwhelming happy, the next absolutely depressed. Nor does Charles hide where he’s from; indeed the closing song is dedicated to his roots in the University of Toronto. This is a strange, fluorescent, electronics-laden album full of emotional twists and turns. Occasionally ‘Girls’ even manages a sort of exhausted grandeur.

The opener begins with a lonely guitar before exploding into a series of synthesizers and drum machine beats. How it flows so effortlessly into the second song is incredible, Charles does a good job of creating the ‘blink miss it’ segue. A dance-like beat anchors the song as Charles sings ‘We are the girls’ despite the fact he does not sound female at all, but rather quite masculine. ‘Run to Soybomb’ has been out for a while as a single but it still remains infinitely entertaining. Here Charles creates the sound of a dying dance song; it is epic, sound and somewhat self-destructive. It may be one of the best tracks on the album. ‘Autumn (where are you?)’ asks what happened to the his favorite season or favorite person. Either way it appears to be on the sad side of things and is one of the less electronic tracks on the album. For the University-dedicated closer he lets the synthesizer build up over the course of the song before it overtakes his humanity.

Overall this is a strange approach to pop music, unstable and heavily emotional. It is a good album. - Beach Sloth

Track #4: Charles Valois, "Spadina"

"Spadina" starts off with near-silent picking, turning into disorienting knots and threads - a wrangling mass of static and ambience. - BlogTO