Octoberman’s ‘Chutes’ Finds Grace in Imperfection and Time

Octoberman returns with Chutes, a spare, warm-toned seventh album on Ishmalia Records that treats breath, hiss, and room tone not as flaws but as essential parts of the music’s architecture. Produced by Jarrett Bartlett with bandleader Marc Morrissette, the sessions prioritized presence over polish: the core takes were recorded live to two-inch tape at Little Bullhorn Studios in Ottawa—no click, no screens—then completed with minimal overdubs at home studios across Ontario. The decision yields performances that breathe at human scale, where micro-rubato, cymbal decay, and the grain of Morrissette’s voice become narrative cues in their own right.

Lyrically, Chutes threads two complementary strands. One revisits third-person vignettes salvaged from older hard-drive demos—short stories set to melody, attentive to gesture and weather. The other is newly confessional, written in the long aftershock of family loss and concerned with how fear, tenderness, and resilience settle into daily life. That dual perspective lets the record scan memory from both sides: as something witnessed from a distance and as something felt in the body. The songs decline melodrama; they move instead with a plain-spoken candor that trusts listeners to connect the dots.

Octoberman’s ‘Chutes’

The ensemble—Morrissette (guitar, vocals, synth), Marshall Bureau (drums, vibraphone), Tavo Diez de Bonilla (bass, vocals), J.J. Ipsen (guitar), and Annelise Noronha (accordion, banjo, guitar, background vocals)—leans into a live-off-the-floor chemistry that favors interplay over ornament. Vibraphone shadings and accordion drones broaden the spectrum without crowding the arrangements; banjo appears as texture rather than twang, a percussive filament threading through the guitars. Bartlett’s engineering keeps the edges intact: transients are allowed to bloom, bass sits wooden and resonant, and the mixes resist the lure of maximal loudness in favor of dynamic headroom.

Octoberman’s long arc has often invited comparisons—Sparklehorse’s lyrical chiaroscuro, Stephen Malkmus’s loose melodicism, the tuneful melancholy of a sunnier Elliott Smith. Chutes honors those affinities while sounding unmistakably like a band deep into its own vocabulary: conversational melodies riding ringing guitars; chord changes that feel inevitable once they land; hooks that announce themselves quietly and then refuse to leave. It is music that trusts repetition and proportion, trading spectacle for durability.

Context matters for a group that has built its reputation by increments rather than pivots. Octoberman’s catalog has placed songs in television and put the band on bills with Julie Doiron, Mount Eerie, and Owen Pallett, but Chutes reads less as a résumé line than as a statement of method. The record’s modesty is intentional: these are songs designed to weather years of listening, to reveal detail at low volume, to meet the moment without straining for it. Even the sequencing underscores the ethos, allowing narrative threads to surface and recede without rigid genre markers or studio gimmicks.

The release arrives with a pair of intimate Ontario shows—small rooms chosen for acoustics and proximity, the better to reproduce the record’s unhurried dynamics and the close-miked intimacy of its voices. Photo credit: Rémi Thériault.

Release and live dates: album out August 27; Toronto’s Cameron House on October 3 and Ottawa’s Red Bird on October 10.