The cover of Yves Jarvis’ latest album, All Cylinders, feels eerily similar, like that of a well-worn 1970s sleeve in the back of your collection. The black-and-white close-up of Jarvis and his bushy mane evokes Rowland Scherman’s photograph on the cover of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits (1967), which earned Scherman $300 despite ultimately selling 40 million copies. The record, released on the In Real Life label, also hearkens back to the Ray Gibson cover of Sonny Sharrock’s Black Woman.
These are not just two arbitrary albums and artists – Dylan and Sharrock are actually decent touchstones to talk about All Cylinders. It most resembles Dylan’s Self-Portrait (1970), which seriously subverted expectations and contained a sprawling 24 tracks, half of which were under three minutes long. Greil Marcus began his legendary Rolling Stone review of that album by writing, “What is this shit?” You may find yourself asking that question with less negative connotations at the end of All Cylinders, especially if you’re already a fan.
Like Self-Portrait, Jarvis’ record has a lot of short songs – 16, to be specific, half of which are under two minutes. It was originally even shorter when it was released in February 2025, with just 11 songs at about 26 minutes. This is the reissued edition of the album, technically All Cylinders (Deluxe), re-released with five extra songs after winning the 2025 Polaris Music Prize in September. While there are some earworms you’ll want to add to your playlist, it’s best imbibed as a whole, one that’s improved upon by the extra tracks.
All Cylinders (Deluxe) is still quick and tight, with short, chimeric songs that aren’t amenable to a single listen. Certain tracks feel like 12-minute progressive rock suites condensed into seven-inch singles without sounding rushed. It’s similar in structure to Guided by Voices and Minutemen, though certainly not in style. If brevity is the soul of wit, maybe it’s the spirit of hits, too.
It’d be easy to dismiss some of these tracks as first drafts, preliminary sketches for future bangers, especially on first listen. It goes by fast (like a locomotion firing on all cylinders, so to speak). However, the more you listen to All Cylinders, the more attuned you become to its epic content in miniature form. With patience, you might agree that most of these songs aren’t really drafts at all; they’re fully realized and polished, even if done so by just one person.
Yves Jarvis was without a studio for some time. He ended up creating this album while couch-surfing in Montreal and Los Angeles, playing every instrument himself and editing it all in Audacity. That was kind of by design, which is probably why the record sounds in no way lo-fi. Jarvis wanted to avoid complexity; “I was like, ‘Let me explore simplicity,’ ’cause there’s so much there,” he told Out Front, perhaps oblivious to the paradox.
“I feel like this is the least contrived thing I’ve ever done,” Yves Jarvis writes in the press notes. It’s seemingly incongruous, but he’s right – each hook, time signature, instrument, and vocal track is seemingly streamlined. Still, they combine in surprising designs, somehow making the accessible experimental and vice versa. The individual lines of each song are straight and simple, but combine to form a complicated cubism.
As such, instead of a scratchpad sprinkled with sketches, All Cylinders feels more like a solo exhibition collecting 16 meticulously detailed, pretty, but mostly tiny paintings that summon you to squint sonically. Taken as a whole, these pictures at an exhibition form a fascinating musical museum that becomes more enjoyable each time it’s played.
The album begins with the sprightly prog-rock of “With a Grain”, a song structured by sudden fluctuations that serves as a mild mission statement for All Cylinders. “Gold Filigree” introduces R&B into the mix, with wicked Prince-style guitar riffs that help energize the otherwise suave number. In fact, this is a fun record for fans of indie rock guitar solos, the kind of gloriously self-indulgent moments of electricity you’d get from Built to Spill and Silver Jews.
“Decision Tree” is one of the catchiest songs on the album, and at just over two minutes, you may want to replay it immediately. “I’ve Been Mean” grips you from the start with alt-rock vibes but defies itself as soon as you think you’ve got its number. It’s one of the most interesting songs on the album, and perhaps the closest to All Cylinders’ best analogue – Steely Dan. It shares that band’s instrumental mastery and compositional restlessness within the framework of radio pop.
“Silver KG” feels like a bona fide pop-country song, polished and posturing. The first half of “I’m Your Boy” is discombobulated, with awkward instrumentation, cheesy production, and cringeworthy lyrical passages. It’s perhaps intentionally alienating (or just poorly planned), but Jarvis comes around and transforms it into a T. Rex-style blast of classic rock. It’s one of the rare times where even tighter editing would’ve been beneficial.
Songs change like that throughout All Cylinders. There’s a relentlessness to the music; you can tell that it is not the product of different minds, gestating through jams, bickering, and happenstance. It doesn’t have that organic feeling of communal workshopping, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Instead, it sounds like the very purposeful puzzle-solving of a specific mind. Every portion of each song seems meticulously planned and impatiently abandoned when boredom sets in for Jarvis.
Arguably, the least experimental aspect of All Cylinders is also the most significant change for Yves Jarvis. Unlike his earlier songs, the vocals are typically front and center with singer-songwriter clarity, which has its pros and cons. On the plus side, it’s nice to hear what Jarvis is saying (although some of the more cringe-worthy lyrics don’t deserve discernment).
He’s also just a good singer, oscillating between sexy and magisterial. Prince, Elliott Smith, Donald Fagen, and Jon Anderson of Yes all come to mind. “The Knife in Me” sounds like he’s channeling Anderson with a heavy dose of Crosby, Stills & Nash. The vocals on All Cylinders are routinely excellent, but they’re polished to a sometimes blander fault. He sounds like just another sell-out radio cowboy on “Silver KG”, for instance.
As a result, something is lost with Jarvis’ more straightforward singing style. There was so much variation in his unpredictable delivery on albums like The Zug (2022) and Un Blonde’s Good Will Come to You (2016). He would mumble and coo, repeat phrases until they lost all meaning, layer his voice bizarrely or deep in the mix, and shock with moments of earnest clarity and soulful simplicity, sometimes all in the same song.
That’s not the case with All Cylinders, which exposes Yves Jarvis’ vocal cords as he plucks them like a stand-up bass. In keeping with the album’s paradoxical nature, Jarvis pushes himself and experiments by singing in a natural, authentic way. It’s vulnerable and brave, in a way, and definitely complements the production’s overall clarity.
This reissue of All Cylinders has the mischievous gall to end with the very beginnings of a bombastic beat, almost militaristic or regal in style. That’s when a single cymbal crash ends the 50-second song and the album as a whole. It’s an appropriate conclusion, sudden and teasing, an exclamation point in bold and not a period. It’s an honest and surprising shout from someone known to whisper.