Ghostly Kisses Offer Haunting Pop Drama on 'Heaven, Wait'

Up-and-coming Quebec City-based artist Margaux Sauvé (working professionally here with Louis-Étienne Santais as Ghostly Kisses) has released her precocious and often beautiful debut with Heaven, Wait. Immaculately produced to bring her breathy, up-close vocal right into your ear, there's a lot to like here — especially if tags like "sophisticated," "avant-garde" or "minimalistic" are wont to auto-fill your search bar. Its high-drama brooding might tip over into art-school preciousness every now and then, but this is quite a solid debut.

The album is divided into roughly two styles: easygoing, progressive-lite tracks that pulse and bubble with crisp 808-style toms and kicks, along with songs that highlight piano, acoustic guitar and string arrangements. Individual taste will guide one's preference here (and there are tracks that straddle both), but memorability seems to favour the former, with the more upbeat rhythms providing a welcome counterpoint to Sauvé's generally sombre chords and mournful vocal style. The softly bouncing "Heartbeat" and previously released title track (do yourself a favour and check out the gorgeous video for this one) open the album strongly in this mode for instance, setting the bar high.

It's a bit of a disappointment then that the wait for more of the same is so long, with most of the album's middle devoted to more minimalistic acoustic tracks that, while they showcase Sauvé's vocals nicely and have a cold, echoing production all their own, seem less fully realized, getting lost in their swirling Byronic gloom just for the sake of it sometimes (although the Middle Eastern-inspired instrumentation of "Blackbirds" stands out). This is made especially apparent when "Carry Me" arrives later on and grabs your attention immediately with its subdued Imogen Heap or Everything but the Girl energy, lifting the album to new heights. How this track has been overlooked as a single can only be explained by a desire to showcase Heaven, Wait's diversity instead — which isn't necessarily its strength (three co-producers are on hand here, with artists like Birdy and Aurora on their resumes, as well as heavy-hitters St. Vincent and Florence + the Machine).

In any event, it's the start of a strong finish for Heaven, Wait, with the almost Enya-like vocal on "Play Dead" adding a nice, if fleeting, touch, and "Green Book" providing an undeniably pretty piano ballad in the penultimate spot. Some added momentum or urgency might be helpful to better shape the melancholy in future, but the same was probably said of early Fiona Apple or Tori Amos. Sauvé treads her artist path well and with purpose.