Photo: Press
It may be three years since Montreal’s Besnard Lakes last record, but within thirty seconds of A Coliseum Complex Museum‘s opener, 'The Bray Road Beast' you quickly learn that it is very much business as usual from the six-piece. Jace Lasek’s falsetto combines with dense guitar feedback that builds to a swampy crescendo complete with monolithic drumming and feedback drenched guitar solo. And therein we have the formula for the vast majority of A Coliseum Complex Museum.
'Towers Sent Her To Sheets of Sound' maintains the same pace. That is the one that runs through the previous three tracks and majority of the remaining record. Aside from some zany electronic augmentation it’s the stage where you begin to feel you’ve heard it all before. And then you realise that if you were to place the previous three Besnard Lakes records in a row and they would bleed into one another seamlessly.
This perhaps, in itself, is not an issue given the calibre of sonic craftsmanship on display, however, with a band that have reached such dizzy heights as on 2010’s ...Are The Roaring Night it leaves the listener with a prosaic and ultimately vacuous listening experience. It is haunting, imposing and accomplished, but is truly memorable?
It would be unfair to be too dismissive; 'The Plain Moon' makes use of an irresistible disco swagger which benefits from less impenetrable production. 'Pressure of Our Plans' begins as if a re-write of album opener, however, Lasek’s most overtly transparent lyric (“all the pressure of our plans together/make our hearts turn to shades of gold) morphs into a the kind of epic anthem that misguided, star-crossed lovers will drink gin to.
But these moments are not numerous enough to influence the overall impression of the record. With A Coliseum Complex Museum Besnard Lakes prove that with their records, like the natural world that so obviously inspires them, it’s all about evolution, not revolution.
