Melanie Valera couldn’t have picked a more apt moniker. As Tender Forever, Valera crafts curiously intimate, sparsely instrumented indie pop – previously seen on 2005’s The Soft and the Hardcore and 2007’s Wider – letting her pipes take centre stage to draw you in close. And close you get. Valera’s voice tends to wrap around you, going from hopeful staccato to desperate howls. Opening with “Got to Let Go,” on which Valera croons, “This song is not for you and it is meant to be/ Just a piece of something nice that you won’t get to see,” the album seems borne the eventual relief and release that comes from heartbreak, that pocket after the end of a relationship where emotions run free and wild, the realization that you’re better off alone. “Day Number” swiftly counts off phases of a dying relationship, followed by the musically optimistic, yet lyrically dark “But The Shape Is Wide.” No Snare – named not for instrumental patterns, but rather, as Valera sings on “The Snare That’s Gone,” “My heart was the snare you could hit anywhere” – is truly an album in the purest sense, a mood that carries through all nine tracks and belies song transitions, each number luring you further into an oddly soothing sorrow, flashes of synths, organs and various percussions. (K records, www.krecs.com) Brietta O’Leary
Winnipeg music & culture since 1989