Montreal-based musician and producer Graham Van Pelt’s impressive multi-instrumental talents first gained notice when his debut album, the lush, Brian Wilson-haunted Five Roses, was nominated for Canada’s esteemed Polaris Award in 2007. In the intervening years, Pelt appears to have been busily absorbing the prevailing indie-pop trends, because Was I The Wave? moves on from the angelic Beach Boys-tinged vocal harmonics into sharper-edged, electronic textures and rhythms. In fact, much of Was I The Wave? is made up of short, quasi-ambient instrumental interludes, each reprogramming the album’s overarching mood before launching into the next clutch of proper songs.

In lesser hands, this could be a suspicious move, a way of pumping up an EP’s worth of tracks into something resembling a full length — or, worse still, of jumping on the indie-ambient-lush out bandwagon. But Van Pelt’s knack for imbuing the machines with effortless charm stands him in good stead, giving the longer vocal pieces a bit of breathing space and enabling the album’s various mood transitions to progress elegantly from nervy, buzzy uncertainty (“Tracers”) to widescreen synth bombast (“Spectre”) to more refined, optimistic digi-pop (“Miscalculations”).

Like other indie groups who’ve embraced the electronics, there are moments when… read more »