Send "The Besnard Lakes " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Leisureblogs |
 Patience isn’t just a virtue, it can be absolutely transcendent. With its long introductions and songs that gently unfold before rolling over the listener like a tsunami, “The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night” (Jagjaguwar) is all about patience and pay-off. The Montreal band’s second album, the 2007 release “The Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse,” established the group’s ambitious mix of orchestral pop and guitar-heavy rock, a marriage of Brian Wilson-like splendor and My Bloody Valentine-worthy roar. On the follow-up, the blend of those two seemingly incompatible styles is even more seamless and refined. The band manages to take its time without ever sounding slack. If the lyrics are a bonfire of earthly anxiety, the music shoots for the skies. Both “Land of the Living Skies” and “Like the Ocean, Like the Innocent” are two-part epics that build with expertly orchestrated force. “Chicago Train” opens in fragile beauty, a far-off voice rising like a wordless siren over doleful strings, then shifts into chugging guitar rock. “Albatross” sets Olga Goreas’ pleas in a womb of woozy guitars, falsetto harmonies and regal trumpets. “Light up the Night” turns cataclysm into a hymn....full text |
| Adequacy |
| On their previous album, The Besnard Lakes were the dark horse, and now they are the roaring night. The shapeshifting comes only in name, though, as the band could have just as easily named their new album The Besnard Lakes Are the Most Consistent Rock Band On Earth. If you’re familiar with Are the Dark Horse, you might do a double take when listening to Are the Roaring Night, because at first blush it sounds exactly the same – the same production values, the same bombastic delivery, the same sweet harmonies. It’s really quite an achievement, and since the band has such a great esthetic in the first place, it is welcome. It’s analogous to van Gogh painting Starry Night the same way twice two years apart. Never has it been easier to say, “If you liked the last one, you’ll like this one.” Filled with sublime vocal lines, swelling harmonies, stringed accents, straightforward rhythms, and monster-sized rocking, this is The Besnard Lakes doing what it does best. However, repeated listening does expose some subtle differences. “Like the Ocean, Like the Innocent” introduces the album with an underlying quivering sound and some squelching discordance, before rising into a defiant wall of sound. “Chicago Train” shows the gentlest side of the band, with strings and omnichord laying a bed for Jace Lacek’s falsetto lullaby. Flute colors the nourish verses of “Land of the Living Skies Pt. 2: The Living Skies” while a mellotron plays through the second half of the song, providing depth through texture. “And This is What We Call Progress” pounds forward with muscular drums and a slinky, almost sleazy riff, not covering much ground but raising the tempo and tension of the album to an exhilarating level. Overall, Are the Roaring Night works just as well as one piece as it does a collection of discrete songs. A ten track album sequenced as two sides, with short introductory ambient noise pieces in slots one and six, the tracks drone on long and stand tall together, creating a monolithic listening experience which feels both constantly building and already there....full text |
| Drownedinsound |
| With this, their third album, The Besnard Lakes have crafted an elegant apocalypse of a record, a world where the atmosphere is forever dictated by the fallout that locks everything in crepuscular gloom, dispelling any conventional sense of time or place. Like the fire and smoke that create a heady mix of orange, purple and red on the album’s cover, any sense of beauty comes from a dead eyed fascination with the vengeful splendour that engulfs the horizon. Even Jase Lasek’s explanation of their moniker hints at the theme of human isolation in the face of a grand and powerful beauty. ‘I grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan and in 1995 I started travelling up to Besnard Lake as a summer trip with my friend. We loved it so much we made a promise to return every year to clear our heads… It’s a very secluded place, and very hard to get to. You really feel like you are the only people there.’ ...the Roaring Night is by no means a perfect record, and there are minor flaws to stand alongside the frequent moments of brilliance, but what cannot be questioned is how skilled they are at shaping layers of sound to form an enveloping whole, with each overlapping texture or shifting tempo plunging the listener further and further into the darkness. In an analysis of another group of Canadians carving their way through a predominantly American tradition, Greil Marcus comments on The Band’s lyrical style. ‘The lyrics are blind baggage, and they emerge only in snatches’. It is the same here where the lyrics act as fever dream, sometimes subdued and murky, sometimes upfront and sharp, but mostly with all thought of narrative clarity substituted for a sense of hypnotic lyrical repetition that allows words and phrases to flicker and fade and rise like a battered zoetrope. As Marcus goes on to state, ‘such a [lyrical] style also seems to link up with an older tradition: the instinct of the American artist to put his story in disguise, to tell his story from the shadows, probably because that is where he usually finds it. Those who mean to seduce do not announce their intentions through megaphones’....full text |
The Besnard Lakes lyrics
|
| |||||||
