(Quick disclosure before we begin – LiY’s lyricist Simon Stephens was my tutor throughout my recent Creative Writing MA. He asked if I’d be interested in reviewing this new album and I enthusiastically accepted, hence the article below.)
When Simon Stephens and Laurence Dauphinais first met virtually on the Royal Court Playwright’s Podcast back in 2021, neither of them knew that a few years later they’d be in the same band. But once Stephens jocularly mentioned Dauphinais’ rock star qualities to her fellow Québécois theatre-maker, Christian Lapointe, the die was cast.
Electropop trio LiY (Lost in Yesterday? Loveless in Yeovil? Lingonberries in Yoghurt? I haven’t asked) grew out of the three writers’ mutual admiration. The tag-team process they operate under is simple. Lapointe starts out by recording the instrumentals. He sends them to Stephens, who writes the lyrics and passes them (and the music) to Dauphinais, who sings them to a melody of her own devising. It’s all done over software, and there is no back-and-forth between.
That fateful podcast saw Dauphinais discussing her deep interest in the march of technology, which is baked into LiY’s debut album Songs for Telescope as soon as opener ‘Don’t Look Back’ putters into life. Lapointe stirs up an uneasy electronic hum freckled with sparse piano chords and experimentally plucked strings. Over the top, Stephens’ lyrics are an augury of late-industrial apocalyptic disintegration, set alight by Dauphinais’ vocals.
You’ll often hear Dauphinais’ most obvious antecedents Björk and Karin Drejer getting called ‘theatrical’, but they don’t have her stage background, which turbo-charges her delivery into something especially entrancing. She sings with an actor’s command of interpretation on hypnotic single ‘Never Wanted’, sliding from a coo to a snarl as she guides us to the punchline between silky, shrieking synths of the sort beloved by Gary Numan.
When she whispers ‘I’m not asking, I’m telling,’ it becomes resoundingly clear why her decisive voice makes the perfect match for Stephens. His lyrics are so often litanies of instruction, refining the embryonic uncertainty of Lapointe’s impressionistic pieces into sharp, purposeful songs of experience.
This works particularly well on ‘Gimme Your Hand’, the members’ considerable talents dovetailing beautifully in a swirl of decadent dance-pop. The electronics buzz and bounce beneath a shaky half-formed melody as Dauphinais forcefully demands ‘Gimme your mind, I wanna dance all morning / Gimme your hand, I wanna drink all night’ with hedonistic glee.
Still, an implicit thread of climate anxiety pulses through Songs for Telescope (more on that later), and ‘Gimme Your Hand’ may suggest that humanity’s unstoppable pursuit of pleasure is what got us into our terrifying contemporary state. Even if that’s not the case, we may well only be chasing romance and magic as a flight from our fear. Think about that on your night out!
The tension between darkness and fun that LiY navigate so well begins with Lapointe’s music. He undercuts the moody, undulating techno beat of ‘Take Me Back to the Room’ with faltering snatches of sweet, cheerful melody suggestive of Speak & Spell-era Depeche Mode, adding to the song’s uncanny sense of instability.
But this contrast shines through the lyrics, as well. The repeated profanity of ‘Round and Round’ initially feels entertainingly, almost amusingly, cocky until Stephens jumps off into a twisted love story of self-absorbed mania and burning bodies. When that sweary intro resurfaces at the end of the song, it drips with a new and delicious dark-hearted menace.
Humanity’s capacity for destruction is a favourite subject of Stephens, whose plays often reference the vast scale of space and the terrifying fragility of our existence. ‘A Song for James Webb’ ties these themes together in a song which, with its nod to the album’s title, ends up being its triumphant centrepiece.
Like the James Webb Space Telescope itself, Lapointe’s ravey synths quaver upwards as if trying to burst through the stratosphere. But as the Sputnik staccato of the backing gives way to a doom-laden drone, Dauphinais’ gripping snarl of ‘If we do this thing, doesn’t that mean we can do anything?’ suggests not the gooey, breathless cosmic awe of Professor Brian Cox but the vertiginous terror of responsibility that scientific progress brings with it.
Stephens pinpoints exactly why this progress can be so frightening – because when we can see everything from atoms to galaxies, so too can we see our own smallness, and we are no longer able to ignore our own devastating role in cause and effect. It’s this, not innocence, which means we can hold infinity in the palms of our hands. But whoever said infinity would be nice?
We can only beat this feeling by making a choice between action and complacency, and that duality is the focus of red-pill blue-pill double bill ‘See the Sky Burn’ and ‘It’s Gonna Be Alright’. Ironically enough, it’s the former track (a list of imperatives) which glows with warm encouragement while the latter (the same rough idea with each instruction negated) goes for passivity and hopelessness.
Rounding off every verse of ‘See the Sky Burn’ with a call to ‘feel the love’, Stephens turns Lapointe’s murky, dense sound-painting into an unqualified celebration of human experience. If such a bold rallying call to live in the moment sounds a bit sentimental for your tastes, then ‘It’s Gonna Be Alright’ should scare you out of your cynicism.
The music swells to a razor-sharp, threatening throb, growing ever tenser as Dauphinais shrieks and moans the title. It warns that positivity and productivity are far from shallow comforts. Instead, they’re necessary correctives to false reassurance and the apathy and authoritarianism it breeds.
Album closer ‘His Cool Hair’ is a particularly eerie reminder of how much we have to lose. Lapointe provides a restrained but stirring backdrop for Dauphinais to tell us about a man with ‘cool hair’ and ‘kind eyes’. This build-up disintegrates into a spare, chilling lament for a world reduced to nothing. We find ourselves confronting the tragic irony of human yearning; how it is strong enough to cross the gigantic voids left by our own actions.
To many people, theatre and modern technology might represent opposite extremes of communication – one simple, intimate, and public-spirited, the other alienating, expansive, and complex. But seeing as Lapointe, Dauphinais, and Stephens have individually fused the two in striking and thoughtful ways on stage, it’s no surprise that together they should do the same on record to stunning effect. Shining through the oppressive darkness, beaming out warped, touching, and passionate odes to human connection, in Songs for Telescope LiY have built a soaring and powerfully communicative satellite of love.
Songs for Telescope is out now – listen and download via LiY’s official website
LiY socials: Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | Spotify
Review by Poppy Bristow
Photography by François Lévesque (Christian Lapointe, left), Anne-Marie Baribeau (Laurence Dauphinais, centre), and Kevin Cummins (Simon Stephens, right)
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