First Look: New Besnard Lakes Album

"Enormous in scale, absorbing, obliterating..." - and an early candidate for 2010 year-end best-of lists, too. The Montreal duo gives My Bloody Valentine a run for its money on Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night, issued this week by Jagjaguwar.

By Jennifer Kelly

The third album by Montrealean married duo Olga Goreas and Jace Lasek churns cathedral-sized anthems and clots them with MBV-ish miasmas of guitar murk.  It pits unstoppable melodic climaxes against paranoiac visions of espionage and betrayal.  Enormous in scale, absorbing, obliterating, this is an album that picks you up on a tidal wave of conjured emotion, sucks you under, tosses you about and finally leaves you beached and gasping.  It is an anti-war album that could rally an army, rousing powerful, untethered emotions to who knows what end.  It is inchoately persuasive, and you buy in without really knowing what the message is.  

Besnard Lakes come out of the same northerly scene that spawned Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade, but also Constellation bands like Godspeed and Silver Mount Zion.  Their aesthetic is somewhere in the sweet spot where damaged Dennis Wilson choruses meet squalls of feedbacked improvisations.  The giant two-parted cuts that frame the album, opener "Like the Ocean, Like the Innocent" and second side epic "Land of the Living Skies", proceed weightily, at a measured pace, from shadowy noise-scapes into soaring, solidarity-engendering melodies.  To listen, even without humming along, is to feel yourself swept up in a larger enterprise, a journey, a shared ethos, that ruthlessly incorporates all comers.  "Albatross," the single starts in a wavering flare of Loveless guitar distortion, picks up Goreas' angelic, dreamy vocals, then intensifies into a dream-march to the sea.  Even casual observations like "Chicago Train"'s repeated assurance that "This is the last train...to Chicago" gain heft and otherworldly significance when tethered to this slow-moving ritual music.  

Roaring Night pulls off the difficult feat of being nearly all crescendo, all finale, without becoming tedious or overblown.  Like 2007's Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse (and, if anything, even more so) this is music right at the edge of bombast but not over it, grand but not grandiose, ambitious but not overweening.