Pseudoscience Fiction by Kristian North

With Pseudoscience Fiction, Kristian North arrives suddenly at a stark pinnacle of sonic maximalism, matched by lyrical worldbuilding that’s phantasmagoric and freaky. In the course of the eight tracks that comprise the Montreal singer-songwriter’s third solo album, North’s deep croon guides listeners through Ballardian manmade nightmares that are equal parts startling and familiar, intimate and colossal. Like the best speculative fiction, North’s vision of the future is deeply rooted in the past. The tracks on Pseudoscience Fiction engage deeply with the aesthetics of ‘70s soul, funk, and disco, but also make dizzying dips into the wildly disparate realms of rock opera, show tunes, and Hawaiian-tinged country, culminating in an assemblage that defies categorization.

At each turn, nothing is as it seems. Imagined worlds dissolve into one another, characters and avatars become interchangeable in their roleplaying. In the chorus to “Masterpiece” North urges himself: “write about now/ write about now” and in the song’s coda, a deranged shock jock promotes locust-deterrent bug spray after welcoming listeners to paradise. The album’s instrumentation is relentlessly unpredictable; North’s third full-length collaboration with iconoclastic producer Renny Wilson at Value Sound Studio in Montréal sees the pair push their sonic palate into extreme, lush territory. Displaying their wide-ranging musical chops, North and Wilson handle the lion’s share of instrumentation here, but the spotlight also shines on performances by Cindy Lee Woland on guitar, Joe Grass on pedal steel, Ari Swan on violin, and Andrea Mercier on sax. North’s nightmare world is bolstered by the voices of an array of singers from Montréal’s music scene, including a duet with Elle Barbara on “Mercy”.

As the album’s title suggests, Pseudoscience Fiction is seated deeply in the realm of sci-fi, drifting through a landscape of bleak dystopian modernity, landing in individualized bubbles of reality. Still, the songs always gesture back towards the personal, with North meditating on aging and loneliness in a time of uncanny disjointedness by way of increasingly complex metaphor and double entendre. An eclectic rotating cast of singers and musicians come and go, voices blending into one another, acoustic instruments stepping aside to let their simulacra shine. Amidst the album’s chaos, jittering on the edge of disintegration, North sounds right at home, welcoming us to the future.

Kristian North eviscerates the very notion of restraint with a maximalist sci-fi epic grounded in the sounds of ‘70s soul, funk, and disco, with dizzying detours into the wildly disparate realms of rock opera, show tunes, and Hawaiian-tinged country, culminating in an assemblage that defies categorization.

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