Plumbiferous Media

Québé­cois band The Besnard Lakes released their third album on the 9th. The Besnard Lakes Are the Roar­ing Night, aside from fol­low­ing the pat­tern of increas­ingly long and irri­tat­ing album names, is a pretty good album; what it lacks in cer­tain areas, includ­ing pri­mar­ily vocals, it more than makes up for in oth­ers. In short, The Besnard Lakes’s strat­egy of releas­ing albums approx­i­mately every three years seems to have worked out pretty well for the band.

As inter­est­ing an album as The Besnard Lakes Are the Roar­ing Night is, the vocals never quite seem to work as well as they should. The album’s slightly con­fused grasp of musi­cal style is in full force in the vocals, which spend much of the album sound­ing as generic as rock vocals can with­out falling squarely into pop. Rep­e­ti­tion in vocal pat­terns as well as lyrics doesn’t help. At the same time, how­ever, the vocals occa­sion­ally fit into the more sub­dued, care­ful form befit­ting The Besnard Lakes’ post-rock influ­ence - “Land of Liv­ing Skies, Part 2″ dis­plays this quite well. Unfor­tu­nately, most of the album’s vocals are noth­ing more than lackluster.

Lyri­cally, The Besnard Lakes Are the Roar­ing Night leaves a cer­tain amount to be desired. It’s impor­tant to note that lyrics seem to be a much lower pri­or­ity than sound for the group, but at the same time, as most of their tracks aren’t instru­men­tal (at least not entirely), the mid­dling lyri­cal qual­ity doesn’t help the album. The lyrics are more generic than they are badly writ­ten - they tend towards repet­i­tive and banal more than any­thing else. Occa­sion­ally, inter­est­ing images stick out, but only for a moment before the lyrics return to their usual state.

The Besnard Lakes Are the Roar­ing Night is a decep­tively good album. The vocals are fairly mediocre, and the lyrics are less than ideal, and the entire album seems lost some­where between rock and post-rock. But get past the minute and a half of intro­duc­tion, and you are imme­di­ately con­fronted by a seven plus minute beauty of a track. It never devolves into sim­ple rep­e­ti­tion, it shrinks and swells in just the right places, and every­thing meshes together quite well. The rest of the album pro­ceeds from there. The Besnard Lakes Are the Roar­ing Night is also a very diverse album, albeit maybe a bit too diverse, as The Besnard Lakes seems to run out of mate­r­ial by “Light Up the Night,” a con­sid­er­ably weaker seven-minute epic.

As an unre­lated prob­lem, The Besnard Lakes Are the Roar­ing Night is best lis­tened to with a mid­dling level of atten­tion. Pay too much atten­tion and the vocal prob­lems, in addi­tion to the ques­tion­able record­ing qual­ity will begin to drill holes into the album. On the other side, if you allow your atten­tion to waver for even a sec­ond, you’ll won­der why you don’t remem­ber the last three tracks in the slight­est. Hav­ing to pay just the right amount of atten­tion to fully enjoy the album does not really help it win over the listener.

For all that’s wrong with The Besnard Lakes Are the Roar­ing Night, at the end there’s more good than bad. The lyrics and vocals may not be strong points, but the album is cer­tainly musi­cally inter­est­ing, and that’s what car­ries it through the bet­ter part of an hour. The album’s diver­sity helps to retain some of the inter­est inevitably lost by the unfor­tu­nately som­no­lent qual­ity of the music, while at the same time offer­ing a decent num­ber of approaches to The Besnard Lakes’ brand of music. All in all, The Besnard Lakes Are the Roar­ing Night is gen­er­ally worth­while, even if it does at times require equal parts selec­tive for­give­ness and listening.

This post is tagged 60-69, The Besnard Lakes