The Besnard Lakes--'The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night'

You know what would make The Besnard Lakes a great band? If The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night had been their first album and The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse had been their follow-up. Are the Dark Horse is an album that snuck up on me. In fact, the first time I listened to it, I wrote it off as a bland postmodern homage to great rock n’ roll, a worthy effort to imitate the heroes from four-and-a-half decades’ worth of musical evolution, but an album that would remain in the shadows of the very sounds it seeks to send up. Then, perhaps because several critics couldn’t stop singing the album’s praises, I decided to listen to Are the Dark Horse again, this time on blast. The blare of my stereo helped me recognize the band’s ability on that album to craft an expansive and diverse sound over just eight tracks, a sound that was not mere homage to—or even worse, a pastiche of—rock n’ roll history (the most obvious players being The Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, and The Flaming Lips), but rather an otherworldly, radio/radio-interference soaked dialogue with the past and with the city.

And to put it simply, The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night is a disappointment by comparison. One adjective comes to mind when describing Are the Roaring Night: stagnant. You can even see it in the song titles, four of which act as parts one and two of a track with the same title. Where the first parts of these tracks (“Like the Ocean, Like the Innocent Pt. 1: The Ocean” and “Land of the Living Skies Pt. 1: The Land”) seem designed to establish instrumental setting for the lyrical exploration of their second parts (“The Innocent,” and “The Living Skies,” respectively [surprise, surprise]), they instead offer only a meaningless, meandering electronic buzz bleeding into round twos that seem even more aimless because the presence of the first parts leads you to expect something far more rewarding.

It’s not that, sonically, the album is uninspired or grating. The cyclone of sound The Besnard Lakes produce on Are the Roaring Night is a mass of strings and piano, fuzz, and rollicking synth sometimes mixed with cruel distortion, organ filling, or robotic beeping that blends smoothly with electric guitar chords and familiar drum patterns. But whereas the organically dynamic compositions on Are the Dark Horse highlight the diverse instrumentation the band offers at its best, those on Are the Roaring Night just boil and evaporate in a tiring cycle of repetition. The static songwriting on display here has the potential to be transcendent and exploratory (like it is on the album’s closing track, “The Lonely Moan”), but most of the time it just makes the listener impatient.

How can this be true of an album called The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night? The title invokes apocalypse, and the album’s fiery illustrations develop this further by suggesting oil- inflicted disaster (a la There Will Be Blood and—eerily—BP). But The Besnard Lakes’ mistake is to align the end of the world with both yawny atmospherics and a two-dimensional presentation of the natural world. The album imagines the sound of apocalypse as the everlasting end in itself, an eternal folding in, instead of allowing or envisioning the possibilities that might arise—for humans, for time and history, or even for nature—at its coming. Lyrically, the album does contain a great deal of mundane natural imagery (a departure from Are the Dark Horse and its urban settings) that undermines Are the Roaring Night’s surface invocation of capitalist greed. For instance, a title like “And This Is What We Call Progress” suggests a mockery of technological progress, a statement that “progress” comes only at the cost of manipulation and ultimately destruction. Yet the lyrics describe instead (and impressionistically) something far more nostalgic and vague, composed of sunlight and playful hideouts.

It’s not surprising, then, the early high points of the album, tracks three and four, “Chicago Train” and “Albatross,” explore natural settings, but remain rooted in the city while allowing for transition and desperation. These songs have within them a liveliness and humanity absent or at least obscured on the rest of the album. The whirring strings and longing falsetto of “Chicago Train” begin its titular journey, and the song’s more repetitive guitar-driven second half is merited by arrival, both at the flashing lights of the city and at the aloneness of adulthood, where Jace Lasek (one half of the husband-wife duo that makes up the band) or his speaker determines that “This is the last time I will follow.” “Albatross” also describes a journey, but one decidedly driven by relationship and its complementing growth and loss. Over whirring static-y guitars, a chorus of oohs, and eventually rolling drums and a brass section, Olga Goreas (the other half) describes experiences with a man who “showed me so much” but who now is gone. The song’s breathless ending finds her claiming that she screams for him: “There goes my man.” The sheer power of apocalypse is demonstrated here, along with its properties of both destruction (the end of the relationship) and creation (of memory and of a new and maniacal emotional state). It’s the strongest moment on the album, and yet the song that follows, “Glass Printer,” brings—with its droning guitar—the listener back to the blasé equilibrium that characterizes the rest of The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night.

This brings me back to my initial point. If Are the Roaring Night were The Besnard Lakes’ first album, “Chicago Train” and “Albatross” could be understood as a foretaste of great things to come. But we’ve already heard great things on Are the Dark Horse, and, unfortunately, “Chicago Train” and “Albatross” seem to function more as reminders of the band’s previous greatness than as signs of the band’s promise for albums to come.