The Besnard Lakes:
A Coliseum Complex Museum:
Jagjaguar:
LP/CD/DD:
Out Now:
Very much part of Canada's evolving indie-rock scene, the spacey, slightly-proggy Besnard Lakes have previously unleashed a quartet of involving albums that have hovered around the fringes of greatness. On album five, they've landed big time. The award-chasing husband and wife turned full band might well christen their songs with one or two outlandish titles but they deliver on harmonies, melodies and arrangements.
Comparable to Mercury Rev, My Morning Jacket and, it must be said, Brian Wilson / Van Dyke Parks at their most epic, The Besnard Lakes create sprawling multi-layered music awash with slow-to-mid-pace drums, keyboards of all origins and little in the way of riffs. They rock but they don't, if you get my drift, utilising an element of studio trickery to skyrocket each song into another dimension. It works, as a rule.
Opener The Bray Road Beast, is as lyrically mythical as its title suggests and edges into psychedelic territory with its sustained drones and druggy pulses. Singer Jace Lasek still hits the falsetto heights like a man possessed, while the rest of the band attempt to keep up by rolling out note after grandiose note. Highlights Golden Lion and Necromonicon hammer out the same ideas but in a more concise three to four minute timescale, while the closing Tungsten 4 : The Refugee (see, I told you about those song-titles) heralds a curtain-call dripping with melodrama and a sniff of the ostentatious.
But don't be put off by these superlatives though - this is an absorbing listen from start to finish, more or less designed to be heard in one sitting. All the tracks from Pressure of Our Plans to Nightingale are a heady blend of what has gone before - much of their previous album Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO, some of The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night, a little of The Dark Horse - but the mix is less muddied than before and the whole opus ends up as dreamy, wholesome, soporific shoegazey reverie.
★★★★★★★★½☆☆
A Coliseum Complex Museum:
Jagjaguar:
LP/CD/DD:
Out Now:
Comparable to Mercury Rev, My Morning Jacket and, it must be said, Brian Wilson / Van Dyke Parks at their most epic, The Besnard Lakes create sprawling multi-layered music awash with slow-to-mid-pace drums, keyboards of all origins and little in the way of riffs. They rock but they don't, if you get my drift, utilising an element of studio trickery to skyrocket each song into another dimension. It works, as a rule.
Opener The Bray Road Beast, is as lyrically mythical as its title suggests and edges into psychedelic territory with its sustained drones and druggy pulses. Singer Jace Lasek still hits the falsetto heights like a man possessed, while the rest of the band attempt to keep up by rolling out note after grandiose note. Highlights Golden Lion and Necromonicon hammer out the same ideas but in a more concise three to four minute timescale, while the closing Tungsten 4 : The Refugee (see, I told you about those song-titles) heralds a curtain-call dripping with melodrama and a sniff of the ostentatious.
But don't be put off by these superlatives though - this is an absorbing listen from start to finish, more or less designed to be heard in one sitting. All the tracks from Pressure of Our Plans to Nightingale are a heady blend of what has gone before - much of their previous album Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO, some of The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night, a little of The Dark Horse - but the mix is less muddied than before and the whole opus ends up as dreamy, wholesome, soporific shoegazey reverie.
★★★★★★★★½☆☆