Besnard Lakes – Are The Dark Horse
As stated by the title of their second full-length, the Besnard Lakes have indeed been something of a dark horse on the Montreal music scene. While the Arcade Fire, Stars, and Wolf Parade have been embraced as genuine indie-rock royalty, this collective’s core duo of Olga Goreas and Jace Lasek toil in relative obscurity. That’ll change with this album. Where the Besnard Lakes’ distortion-strafed debut cast the band as a space-station version of Sonic Youth, this eight-song stunner blasts off for new galaxies. The soft-rock wonder “Disaster” imagines the Carpenters high on Lee Hazlewood, “For Agent 13” begins with midnight-mass organ before exploding into a son-of-Sigur Ros shoegazer, and “Cedric’s War” updates Factory-brand paisley-pop for 21st-century bohos. Most devastating of all is, appropriately, “Devastation”, a hyper-heavy slab of beautifully epic post-prog. Once a 20-to-1 longshot, the Besnard Lakes suddenly look like the odds-on favorite to be Montreal’s next big thing.