The word from Nancy Letitia’s own camp likens her debut EP, The Love Dream, to “the audio aesthetic of a ’90s Skinemax movie.” That evocative assessment actually doesn’t seem too far off for the work of Vancouver’s Letitia, but it probably doesn’t give her the props she deserves, either. Her simultaneously low-key and larger-than-life instrumentals, which place lo-fi keyboard lines at the center of otherwise sultry and sumptuous production, bear an undeniably postmodern feel. Sure, it’s possible to picture some of the tunes as the soundtrack to some softcore late-night straight-to-video delight, but it’s equally easy to imagine anything on The Love Dream playing at some Lana Del Rey-hosted Hollywood pool party where everyone is watching Paul Thomas Anderson movies.
Well, however you care to peg Letitia’s music, her new video for the track “Ur Pocket Mirror Is Too Big” makes a striking statement in and of itself. The computer-generated images that are the clip’s focus would have been intriguing enough on their own, but director Felix Gourd chose to show them on a big-screen TV that’s been upended in a swimming pool. This off-kilter visual approach makes for a perfect match with the music, but coming as the EP does from the conceptually simpatico Noise Collector Records, one would expect nothing else.