Mixing reminiscence on the highs and lows of growing up in a small town with bits of the town’s cultural history, Sluice’s debut album Le succès par le travail is working double duty. The release’s youthful energy and hyper-specific regional history make it an eight-track time capsule straight out of Trevor Murphy’s life.
Inspired by Murphy’s home region of Par-en-Bas, Nova Scotia, the album’s tracks contain the region’s spirit through Murphy’s memory.
Encompassing several Acadian communities near Yarmouth, Par-en-Bas was one of the first locations of Acadian settlement, and it is rich with Acadian culture. And the band’s namesake — the sluice (or aboiteau) — is a huge part of that history and culture due to the region’s location on the Bay of Fundy.
With tracks on young love, like “Ma première drogue” and “Bunker’s Island,” and on the spontaneous teenage spirit, like “Runnin’ the Roads,” the album contains a certain nostalgic energy. It takes listeners back to the days when emotions ruled everything and responsibilities were few.
It also takes listeners straight to Par-en-Bas. Murphy incorporates references to the region’s landmarks, like Bunker’s Island and the former École Sainte-Anne-du-Ruisseau. He also makes mention of the aboiteaux, in “Électrique,” and to the early days of Acadian settlements, in “Un été sans frontières.”
Murphy rounds off the cultural, regional and historical aspects of the release with his use of the region’s dialect of Acadian French. But the only track with English lyrics, “Catachèse A+,” still serves a good helping of Acadian culture by describing the region’s heavy saturation of Roman Catholicism.
While the tracks are entirely composed by Murphy and primarily performed by him, too, he recruited a backing of musicians to perform with him on the recordings. Those musicians include Josh “Pinky” Pothier (Sleepless Nights, Kuato) and Chris Murdoch (Black Dots, Souvenir) on drums; José Contreras (By Divine Right), AA Wallace (Sleepless Nights, Cheval), Jay Methot (Quiet Parade), and Jean-Étienne Sheehy (Deep Fryer, Saint-Jack) on guitars; and Julia Weir (Quiet Parade), Connor Booth (Quiet Parade, Good Dear Good), Chantal Caissie (Wildest Dreams), and Serena Wu on backing
vocals.
Le succès par le travail‘s upbeat and young energy lend to its themes of youth and history, turning it into an ode to a specific time and place. It is a time capsule in music form, preserving a specific set of emotions and memories and remembering the physical surroundings that shaped them.