To ask for a desert-island top five of songs featuring actual dog vocals is to beg for a list that straddles novelty and the uncanny. Sure, you’d get the usual suspects: Jane’s Addiction’s gleefully kleptomaniac “Been Caught Stealing,” Mitski’s lupine death-knell “I’m Your Man,” the Beach Boys’ heart-sick “Caroline, No,” maybe Fiona Apple’s “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” where those barks feel like someone tearing through drywall. Most canine cameos exist as ambient vérité, or in Mitski’s case, as harbingers of doom—hounds circling the outskirts of judgment. But now there’s a new entrant, and it’s a scene-stealer: “Plastique Couch,” the off-kilter gravitational center of Panorama, the third solo album from singer and bassist Hélène Barbier. The track wobbles like a dream you can’t wake up from—Michel Gondry by way of the dollar-bin art-punk cassette. Backing vocals skitter and mutate after every chorus, and by the final pass, they belong to Barbier’s mountain dog Toody, whose gravelly barks land exactly on beat. She’s not panicked, not interrupting—she’s grooving.
That exact deadpan weirdness animates everything Barbier touches. Her lyrics hint at breakages both emotional and existential, but she rarely lets the temperature rise above a steady simmer. Panorama is full of scratchy, laconic art-punk in which the chaos is tightly leashed. On “Dans l’os,” she coos, “Pour toi, le temps n’a rien arrangé”—for you, time hasn’t healed a thing—but she sounds like she’s rolling her eyes. “Water,” the album’s most classically structured moment, sugarcoats its frostbitten kiss-off (“When you die, I won’t smile”) with bright, filigreed guitars that echo Verlaine at his most wandering. The synth-stained “Milquetoast” is practically a children’s chant about wanting to go home, Barbier transforming the title phrase into a two-note mantra: “Milk! Toast, toast.”
Though born in France, Barbier has embedded herself deeply in Montreal’s underground. Formerly of the post-punk trio Moss Lime, she now co-runs Celluloid Lunch, a small-press universe of zines, tapes, and errant ideas, with husband and Panorama guitarist Joe Chamandy. She’s never been a spotlight-seeker, but here she sounds like an especially charismatic outlier—like a version of Jane Birkin who accidentally wandered into the no-wave wing of the ’80s. Over nine tracks, she toggles between French and English, slips from skeletal no-wave (“Marcel”) to minimalist art-pop (“Milquetoast,” “Weather Channel”), and pulls in Meg Duffy for shimmering guest guitar. A few songs, like the wandering “Lapin,” never quite click into gear, but when a groove lands—“Plastique Couch,” especially—it’s endless.
Across its brisk 27 minutes, Panorama lingers through sheer peculiarity. Barbier’s arrangements rely on serrated basslines and blades of guitar, but she often hollows out the low mids, creating a strange, airy vacuum in the center of the mix. It’s most dizzying on “Marcel,” where increasingly abrasive guitars stack themselves atop a zigzagging bass line as if several players were auditioning simultaneously. The resulting chaos feels like an unintended homage to Eno and Bowie’s “accidental” improvisation games—forcing Adrian Belew to play blindfolded, key unknown. Whether Barbier employs similar trickery is unclear, but the impulse feels right. Panorama is a record committed to the art of sounding just slightly wrong, the kind of wrong that becomes sublime. And sometimes, as it turns out, the missing ingredient is a dog.
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