It's not too hard to imagine what the Besnard Lakes' record collection might look like after hearing the eight songs here--the Beach Boys and Spiritualized taking position somewhere near the front--but that doesn't break the tantalizing spell cast by the Montréal husband-and-wife team of Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas. A dreamy cocktail of West Coast harmonies, glum strings, and fuzzy psychedelic arrangements, the disc is something of a bleak masterpiece that takes after the Arcade Fire's Funeral. Songs like "Disaster" and "Devastation" (it's not too hard to detect a theme, either) rattle around on wobbly guitars and shimmering electronic effects until they spill over in a big rumpus, driven on by a six-person band and five-piece choir. The group's main attraction, however, is Goreas, who has a softly sensual voice pitched somewhere between Hope Sandoval and a wet, warm kiss behind the ear. --Aidin Vaziri
Review by J. Scott McClintock
The Montreal-based husband-and-wife duo of the Besnard Lakes really work some of the old yin-and-yang magic on their debut release The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse. Throughout the eight tracks, the push-and-pull of crunchy guitars versus delicate, stringy instrumentation seems to reflect the dynamic between Olga Goreas and Jace Lasek themselves (with wife Goreas, seemingly the prime instigator for the power chords). It's a slightly indulgent affair, but the only way to get these seemingly disparate qualities to play nice on an album together is to sweat over it -- and sweat they did, but not on somebody else's timecard. Utilizing their own studio, Goreas and Lasek could, and did, take plenty of time getting their vision to come through in the mixes, and the ebb-and-flow between abrasive and lilting isn't half as jarring as you might think. It's like a Beach Boys album when it's calm and a Queen album when it's crunchy, but all filtered through what must be one hell of a record collection over at the Goreas-Lasek homestead.
Drowned in Sound Review by
Jordan Dowling
Something I've always wondered is how people become aware of a band and fall in love with them. Are the majority of ears pricked from the airwaves, through hyperactive videos on music television, through relational websites such as Last FM or Pandora? Every person that falls in love with any band has their own story. Personally, I have Canadian artist Adam Brown to thank for turning me onto The Besnard Lakes, whose debut UK release The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse hits our shores this Monday. If I can pass on the favour to at least one reader then it will be one of the most positive gestures I could hope to make.
For like Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah before them, this Montreal band has released an indie classic from completely out of the blue. Not that they sound at all similar to the aforementioned three, but you feel the band’s elegiac mix of shoegaze, downbeat pop and post-rock would have struggled to formulate from anywhere other than underground indie's own Mecca.
The eight-track album kicks-off in great, if understated, style with 'Disaster', a slow-core masterpiece that lies in the same bed as Low circa The Curtain Hits The Cast and Mazzy Star's unexpected hit 'Fade Into You' before triumphant trumpet calls and slow-motion garage-rock chords drag it upwards, with lulling coos of "baby c'mon" perhaps being the only thing stopping the track from breaking through the stratosphere.
This is followed by 'For Agent 13', a slight left turn sonically but an (unexpected) positive shift up in gear quality wise; its reminiscent of M83's latest album covered with a thick layer of Sigur Rós' glacial wizardry, and is complemented by '...And You Lied To Me', a seven-and-a-half-minute slice of winter-kissed Americana that My Morning Jacket might record after relocating to a kerosene-heated hut in the middle of miles of icy tundra. Throughout the rest of the album the band take these elements and integrate them further, with dual female and male vocals soaring, guiding the rest of the band through many dark corridors and early morning expanses.
That music so majestically restrained in pace can make your heart beat so quickly is a testament to The Besnard Lakes’ focus and ability to coat each millisecond of track time with an utterly captivating sound without ever becoming clogged up with their myriad ideas. It can be hard to take in all The Besnard Lakes offer in the first couple of listens, but this in no way makes …Are The Dark Horse a difficult album; it provides equal satisfaction from five-minute listens and a complete devouring of the album.
The Besnard Lakes definitely are the Dark Horse, but this horse is a thoroughbred that could easily win the prize of best album of 2007. Should they fall short of that, they’ll simply become your new favourite band.
Rating: 9
The Besnard Lakes
Are the Dark Horse
[Jagjaguwar; 2007]
Rating: 8.2
As the title of their second album makes plain, the Besnard Lakes are indeed the dark horses of a Montreal indie rock community that has consumed so many column inches in the music press over the past three years, a band that's often stood on the periphery of greatness-- they opened the Unicorns' 2004 North American tour, while singer/guitarist Jace Lasek's Break Glass Studio produced Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary and Sunset Rubdown's Shut Up I Am Dreaming-- but never tasted it themselves. Though it's not as if the Besnard Lakes were unfairly denied their due, having released a gauzy 2003 debut that was heavy on languorous shoegazer jangle/drone, but low on personality and vigor.
The Dark Horse shares that album's deliberate sense of pacing, precious attention to detail and hermetic sound-world atmosphere; the difference here is that almost every song builds to a crucial moment where the Besnards bravely step out of the shadows, and in the process, transform from being a merely good band to a great one. And just as the individual tracks ascend to their own internal peaks, so too does the eight-song sequence as a whole, which means patience is certainly a virtue here: Opener "Disaster" begins as a swell of forlorn falsettos and weepy strings (courtesy of in-house arranger Nicole Lizee and moonlighting Godspeed violinist Sophie Trudeau) that yields to a slumberous chorus of Brian Wilson harmonies; "For Agent 13" is all slow-dissolving, ladies-and-gentleman-we-are-floating-in-Spiritualized tremolos and mournful coos that sound like they're coming from a castrated Sigur Ros.
It's not until the third track, "And You Lied to Me", that The Dark Horse really achieves lift-off, and not without some great effort: the song seems to be deliberately working against its itself with its Floydian glide, oddly timed drum rolls at the chorus and frequent pauses filled in with strange, indecipherable murmurs. But finally, at the 4:56, we hit pay dirt: after a brief stop, the drums kick in and guitarist Steve Raegele and guest Jonathan Cummins (ex of the Doughboys, currently of Bionic) blast into a glorious two-way duel worthy of its own planetarium laser show. And then instead of coming down, the Besnards turn it up another notch thanks to bassist/Lacek's belle Olga Goreas' star turn on "Devastations", a hellacious, fuck-the-man screen delivered in 70s-smooth girly harmonies that provide an uncanny contrast to song's monstrous psych-metal groove and-- oh yes-- climactic three-way drum solo.
Together, these two songs form the front half of The Dark Horse's awesome middle stretch, but their playful bombast is effectively counterbalanced by the two songs that follow: "Because Tonight" is the album's most moving performance, a swaying space-rock ballad that intensifies into a beautifully bawling chorus; "Ride the Rails" is its most foreboding, with a circular bass riff and ominous violin inflections that lend it an ominous allure. It's also the song that best exemplifies Lacek's recurring lyrical strategy of trading off between World War II-era imagery and the present tense, with verses told through the eyes of a desperate drifter ("Gotta find a better to go on") and a chorus ("my father rides the rails") that shifts the perspective to a contemporary third-person telling. So it figures that the one song with an identifiably modern setting-- Brooklyn set piece "On Bedford and Grand"-- is the one that ultimately breaks The Dark Horse's dreamlike spell, an amiable but uneventful fuzz-pop exercise on which the Besnards come off as just another band of shoegaze revivalists.
But as sprightly Beach Boys pastiche "Cedric's War" gallops triumphantly to the finish line, you realize what's really remarkable about The Dark Horse: that for all its epic intimations and interstellar overdriving, the album still clocks in at a lean 45 minutes. Clearly, the Besnard Lakes are the product of a generation that remembers when their favorite albums used to fit perfectly on one side of a C90. But they've retrofitted classic-rock grandeur to indie-rock dimensions and forged their own special niche-- space-rock that's down to Earth.
-Stuart Berman, February 20, 2007
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