Not Now.

Maintenant is the rather jaunty name of this new album from a band (term used very loosely here, since I count approx. forty “members”) operating out of Vancouver, B.C., name of Gigi.

The joke here being that mainentant is French for “now,” while the whole idea was actually to make the music sound like “then.”

“Then” in this instance meaning early 1960’s pop musique à la Phil Spector & cetera, that kind of thing. So, among the first things you’ll notice is the pervasive & distinctive giant-room echo, & then the spiffy vintage girl-group-style harmonies directly out of the Shangri-Las or the Ronettes or what have you, & of course the brass accompaniment whose verb tense is decidedly past conditional, sounding not so much like any music anybody makes today.

It’s a fun experiment, done pretty much straight up & w/out irony. Unless you count the perpetual dissonance between the sunny, perky demeanor of the vocals versus the bleak, existential darkness of the lyrics. e.g., the words are constantly along the lines of “In love w/no one & no one in love w/me,” & "crying my eyes out for the 100th time," yet you can actually hear the grinning in the singers’ delivery.

No, My Heart Will Go On (Choru...