Besnard Lakes

Montreal-based Besnard Lakes, built around the core duo of Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas, debuted in the shadow of shoegazers such as My Bloody Valentine and Jesus And Mary Chain with Volume 1 (2003).

Are The Dark Horse (Jagjaguwar, 2007) marked a quantum leap forward in terms of arrangement (including strings and horns) and songwriting. It better demonstrated the duo's ability to span several ages and styles within the same composition: doo-wop of the 1950s, psychedelic-pop of the 1960s, West Coast sound of the 1970s, college-rock of the 1980s, post-rock of the 1990s, and alt-country of the 2000s.
Fundamentally elegiac in nature (with the notable exception of Devastation, that inherits from the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour the sense of a surreal merry-go-round), the program of the Besnard Lakes is a study in warping space and time via repetition and variation, an idea best expressed in On Bedford and Grand. That quality is given a metaphysical meaning by the sweet slow-motion prayer of For Agent (a modern version of Popol Vuh's Hosianna Mantra with a one-minute crescendo of triumphant ecstasy) and by Because Tonight, that opens hypnotically with sparse echoes of reggae and chamber music, but then intones a hymn-like melody against fibrillating guitar. They are both spiritual oases in a desert of anguished hedonism.
The dangers of Lasek's program are evident in And You Lied to Me, a bad imitation of late, melodramatic Pink Floyd, and Disaster, that feels like Burt Bacharach in a psychedelic trance: just transposing someone else's art into the 2000s does not qualify as art itself.

Besnard Lakes' lead guitarist Steve Raegele debuted solo with Last Century (2009).

The Besnard Lakes' Are The Roaring Night (Jagjaguwar, 2010) is another work of divergent ideas. On one hand there are relatively simple songs such as Glass Printer, a psychedelic hymn with hypnotic beat and cascading guitar riffs. On the other hand there are mutant novelties that prove hard to grasp. Like The Ocean Like The Innocent blends a thundering rhythm, gritty Neil Young-ian guitar licks and languid vocal litany. The ethereal swoon of bassist Olga Goreas' vocals first leads Albatross to an elegant metamorphosis towards a "wall of sound" apotheosis replete with trumpets and jangling guitar and then fuels the emotional crescendo of Land Of Living Skies (the former being much more successful than the latter). The construction of Chicago Train is one of the most convoluted of their career: a chamber elegy for strings, omnichord and church castrato voice suddenly morphs into a bombastic power-ballad. The thick, turgid and viscous production seems to detract, overall, from the effectiveness of the songs. Light Up The Night aims for a martial prog-rock epos but it simply repeats a trivial refrain ad nauseam.

Until in Excess Imperceptible UFO (2013) leaned on the dreamy side of their psychedelic pop with the Pink Floyd-ian People of the Sticks and the Jefferson Airplane-esque At Midnight.

A Coliseum Complex Museum (2016) was even more ethereal and languid. Slow-motion lullabies like Necronomicon too often turn into lukewarm and rather tedious litanies (Tungsten 4 The Refugee). They sound like the Bee Gees in The Plain Moon and the best song is probably yet another Pink Floyd imitation, Nightingale. Golden Lion and Towers Sent to Her Sheets of Sound embrace more abstract models of psychedelic chanting and arrangement but it all remain too hazy.