Yves Jarvis treats songwriting like a hit-and-run. Melodies crash in, leave a mark, and vanish before you know what happened. He doesn’t linger, doesn’t indulge. You get the taste, then it’s gone. He’s always been restless, but All Cylinders shifts the terms of engagement. This time, he’s letting songs breathe. The chaos is still there, but the signals are clearer. He’s talking in verses and choruses now. You hear the bones of the thing. With a Grain starts in a narcotic drift—floating keys, brushed percussion—then a ringing tone snaps it into place. A taut rhythm kicks in. “Everything I say / Take it with a grain,” he sings, setting the rules. Elsewhere, he works within tighter frames but keeps the edges jagged. Gold Filigree has Prince vibes all over it—jazzy, ornate, intricate melodies and whimsical elegance. Decision Tree has the gleam of West Coast pop, full of handclaps and daylight. The Knife in Me starts like a disco reverie before dissolving into folk shadows, the dancefloor traded for a firepit. Patina lands a punch in 14 seconds—two guitar chords, done. He built this whole thing himself. No session players, no engineers. Just a laptop, a couch in Montreal, another in L.A. He ran it all through Audacity, an open-source software better known for bootlegs than studio records. The sound reflects that: raw, immediate, unpolished by design. You hear the influences if you listen for them—Brian Eno’s oblique tactics, the scrappy elegance of McCartney II, the jazzy-ornate intricacies of Prince or sweeping harmonies and pastoral lyricism of Fleet Foxes—but the synthesis is his own. At its core, All Cylinders is a study in discipline. What happens when you set constraints and follow them? When you cut the excess and sharpen what’s left? Jarvis has answers, but he won’t explain them. You just have to listen.