Another one from the piles…Gigi’s Maintenant

This one had been sitting in a pile next to my hard drive for months, a neglected pop gem that borrows from 60s girlgroup, Brit pop and indie in a remarkably fresh, interesting and unaffected way. I probably would never have listened to it, except for the recycling project and the fact that my fellow Dusted writer Benjamin Ewing called Maintenant “the great, underappreciated record of my 2010.”

He described it like this: “A collaborative effort out of Vancouver from songwriter Nick Krgovich, producer Colin Stewart, and their collective of singers and musicians, Maintenant is probably too clean-cut and wide-eyed for contemporary “importance” — even in the always largely backward-looking realm of indie pop. But among the many new records bathed in reverence for pop’s past, it’s Maintenant that has worn best. Marked neither by ironic distance nor simple mimicry, the record sweeps and swoons with the class of Tin Pan Alley rebranded as the Great American Songbook, and the exuberance of 1619 Broadway’s youth-infused professional pop. Maintenant was just right for another year of listening chock-full of nostalgia, and appropriately half-hearted wishing it weren’t so.”

You can read the rest of Benjamin’s 2010 wrap here


“Alone at the Pier”