These days it’s getting harder and harder to find something to smile about. Grin, the second album of Toronto-based blueVenus offers itself for consideration.  Grin is a tale of hurdles; the overcoming of them, the outright avoidance of them, and the tracks of tears and smiles of the miles in between.

The album starts with the title-track and for a few seconds it sounds like you’re about to head down to O Brother, Where Art Thou? country.  But right before you get to the crossroads, blueVenus hits the breaks on Bourbon Street and the dancing ensues.  By the time you hear, “Everyone will say life gave you a lemon/You just got to grin” it’s too late; grief or not, you’re feeling funky and ready to go along for the ride.  On guitar Devrim Eldelekli is a virtuoso of cool, wielding his axe with a dizzying precision, transitioning seamlessly from the bad-ass bluesy riffs of “In Between” to the radiating roar of the Johnny Greenwood-reminiscent rumble of “Lucky Well” and “The Life” to the jazzy jamming on the Fiona Apple-ish “No Time To Waste,” which also showcases the potent pipes of Andrea De Boer.  To say De Boer has a powerful voice is selling her short; she can sound as delicate as fine China—and we’re talking the good stuff that momma only brings out only for holiday dinners—and as powerful as a cabaret crooner from a bygone era of women singers who only needed one name because they were that damn good: Ella, Billie, Janis, you name it, Andrea De Boer can hold her own.

Together, Eldelekli and De Boer are as much sound mates as they are soul mates, and as listeners we’re treated to their sweet intimacies.  Difficult to squeeze into a genrelization, there’s no doubt Grin has a pop sensibility to it; the album is catchy, laden with tunes tailor made for the tapping of toes.  Even when it threatens to get cheesy with a song like “Happy Tune”, the ska/early No Doubt vibe that starts things off gives way to a perfectly happy-go-lucky ditty, summing up everything that’s good and bad about those parts of adolescence that we’re supposed to grow out of, but never do (if ever a song was made for a John Hughes movie it’s this) and by the end you find yourself with a fitting grin.  You could call the album jazz, pop, rock, or any number of other modifiers and they’d all fit, but above everything else Grin is fun.  Take “Ohrwurm”, just when it sounds like you’re getting a long-lost outtake from Sgt. Pepper Eldelekli goes Jay-Z and busts out a German rap.  If you don’t know German what he says is anybody’s guess, but it fits, and it’s fun, and there’s not just something to that; there’s something to be said about that.  Smiling might not be as easy and organic as it used to be.  But there are no sour lemons behind this Grin; in matters of sound, blueVenus is as sweet as they come.   Drink it up.