Third Child
The Link first encountered Franco-American musician Third Child (Ryan Lloyd) in the balmy late days of summer, opening for a really loud slowcore show at Casa del Popolo. By this point already having rebuffed the full-band lineup for a broken down, solo-guitarist aesthetic, he was arrestingly alone, up there on stage, differentiated from the loud, repetitive nature of the remainder of the night’s bill. I was immediately struck by his structures, clever combinations of samba and jazz themes that adeptly toe a line between disjointed melodies and pop arrangements.
He’s also incredibly charming.
Cut to a depressingly gray day in September. Lloyd was kind enough to make his way northward to St. Joseph, where we shot a live session on a rather drab cement roof, ducking sporadic showers and sighing at overhead helicopters. Lloyd displayed his signature charisma and normcore swagger, and then busted out a new, previously unheard jam entitled “Flannery O’Connor”. This track is a gorgeous Third Child ballad, an amalgamation of pop stylings cut together into a dizzyingly effective tune, at once catchy and meditative, full of cuttingly memorable one-liners and a flurry of cultural references. The culmination is one similar to meeting Lloyd — immediately disarming, totally endearing.
Ryan Lloyd lives and works in Montreal. He has one full-length record released, and more in the works.
Check out Third Child here:
https://thirdchild.bandcamp.com/album/cthuwho
Video by Shaun Michaud & Michelle Pucci
Sound and Production by Zach Goldberg
Written by Zach Goldberg
