The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night (Jagjaguwar) 15/03/10

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Husband and wife songwriting team Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas, along with a couple of other band members, form Montreal’s The Besnard Lakes, who have been quietly crafting ethereal, twisted guitar rock to do some serious navel-gazing to since the early part of the millennium. Third album ‘The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night’ comes three years after its predecessor, and a full seven years since 2003’s ‘Volume 1’ saw them come into the world, like a giant, lolloping sea monster emerging from the musical deep.

Often compared to The Arcade Fire for no good reason other than that both bands are centred around a married couple and come from Canada, The Besnard Lakes sound has traditionally owed more of a debt to a heavily sedated Beach Boys experimenting with progressive rock, like the sound that might have been echoing around Brian Wilson’s head during his more serene moments while he was locked away in his bedroom for all those years. What he failed to pull himself together to create, The Besnard Lakes have done for him.

This latest offering has elements of the same theme, third track ‘Chicago Train’ being a prime example, but those familiar with earlier material will detect a definite shift in emphasis. Previously, the Beach Boys influence went hand in hand with the sort of experiments in sounds and textures that would have given Thom Yorke goosepimples while ‘In Rainbows’ was just a twinkle in his eye. As they moved through second album ‘The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse’, though, a kind of progressive, shoegaze rock began to jostle for position, the sort of thing that another husband and wife team, New Jersey’s Yo La Tengo, would look smilingly on in approval at when feeling at their grungiest.

It’s that kind of prog rock which seems to be floating The Lakes’ boat in 2010. ‘Albatross’ could have sat easily on Yo La Tengo’s Popular Songs, while ‘Like The Ocean, Like The Innocent’ and ‘Glass Printer’ provide the missing evidence that Field Music, who bleed prog if you cut them, really can trace some sort of ancestry back to The Beach Boys.

The problem is that if you’re not careful, the whole album will wash over you before you’ve even realised it’s begun. Whereas previous records took the aforementioned elements and wove them into something which was at times hair-raising, at times spirit-lifting, this latest set of material is in danger of being Field Music at their tamest, The Beach Boys at their most self-indulgenty inaccessible, Yo La Tengo filling album space.

Fans and purists might well find something to love, but in the unlikely event that increasing their fan base was on the agenda for 2010, ‘The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night’ is probably not the album that will do it for them.