Ryan's Besnard Lakes Review

The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night is an odd album to listen to. It doesn't really feel like a modern album, and that's something that starts from the cover art – it's an absolutely gorgeous oil painting that would look great on the sleeve of a vinyl record, rather than on a tiny Ipod screen or CD case. That classical aspect of the art is reflected in the material in the album; we've sort of swung back into a new age of the single, as a society, but this album is a holistic piece of art. On my first listen through the album I had to double-check that I was listening to separate tracks, because they all flowed into each other seamlessly. This isn't to say that they all sounded the same, or were repetitive, but rather that each song seems like a movement within a larger composition. It's reminiscent of the golden age of the album that was the late sixties and seventies, in some ways.

At the same time, though, the soundscape being produced here isn't “classical” in any way, despite the lack of modernity. If anything, the opposite is true; the laser-like precision of the instrumentation and sterile environment generated by the lyrics give it a futuristic feel. If David Lynch were making science fiction films set in the far future, this album is very much the kind of thing that would appear on the soundtrack.

That feeling of sterility is what stopped me from being able to get into this album. Listening to it, I felt separated from what was happening lyrically, as if the artists themselves wanted to keep distance between themselves and the material that they're writing about, which only creates a greater distance between the listener and the subject matter.

Ultimately, I can see the merits of this album on an academic level, and I can definitely understand why it would be included on the Polaris shortlist, but it was unable to create any sort of emotional resonance for me.