The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night
The Besnard Lakes
Score:68
Reviewer: Justin Pearsall
Label: Jagjaguwar (USA & UK), Outside Music (Canada)
Reviewed: Feb 23rd '10, Released:2010
In moving on with The Roaring Night, The Besnard Lakes have cut back the retro pop in their sound in favour of their post rock ambitions. While the music is still characteristically that of the band, favouring one style has diminished a big part of The Besnard Lakes’ personality. The result of this new focus is an album that is bold, but also one that lacks the sparks of previous efforts.
For those familiar with The Dark Horse, The Roaring Night has little of the familiar melodies or interweaving harmonies of a song like ‘Disaster’. The closest is the fuzz rock of ‘Albatross’, whose distortion and heavy rhythms belies its melodic charms. Instead, The Besnard Lakes now concentrate on moments of ambience stacked up against mountains of guitars. The two parts of ‘Like The Ocean, Like The Innocent’ fittingly portray this. The song grows from swelling feedback into grinding rock. It’s a microcosm of the album, and is also among its finest moments.
Where The Roaring Night falls down is in the unrelenting heaviness of the album. The weight, in sound and repetition, has little release, and over the course of the album’s 10 tracks a monotony develop that hurts individual songs.
The Roaring Night is full of evidence that The Besnard Lakes are a good band. The performances are strong, the songs tightly constructed and progressive. But, unlike The Dark Horse, there isn’t enough on The Roaring Night that stakes a claim at a great album. In losing some of their melodic sense, the band has forgone an important part of their identity, a part that put them clearly ahead of their post rock contemporaries.
With this said The Roaring Night still is a well-polished and solid album. For fans of the band, especially those who favoured the second half of Dark Horse, there is still a lot to like about The Besnard Lakes, but for the uninitiated you’d be better off checking out their earlier work before seeking out The Roaring Night.
