Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 3/5 Released: February 20, 2007 Reviewer: Nathan Atnikov |
If playing your guitars out of tune and singing off key are the new playing your guitars in tune and singing on key – which they almost certainly are – then The Besnard Lakes are at the forefront of a musical revolution. Or at least they are for the first track off of The Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse, ‘Disaster,’ which sounds like a band too in love with their ideas for their own good.
Fortunately, the band settles in after that and produces some truly stunning pieces of work. The band’s specialty appears to be the immense layering of tidbits of sound overtop one another in a way that sounds totally messy, but seems to work. Mostly it’s the melodies of Olga Goreas and Jace Lasek that make the songs listenable, and though the band has been compared to the Beach Boys countless times, there’s really nothing here nearly as accessible as the kings of surf-pop.
The odd thing about Dark Horse is that you learn almost nothing about the band from listening to the album. You can be sure that the band are wizards in the studio, but it’s hard to picture how these songs would turn out live, and even after 45 minutes – the running time of this 8 song LP – you still aren’t really sure what this band sounds like. Repeated listenings are certainly required to grasp this one, but the light at the end of the tunnel may just be brighter than most.
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