By Jesse Cataldo
The Besnard Lakes – Are The Dark Horse – Jagjaguwar
The Besnard Lakes arc towards greatness on their second album- and occasionally reach it. But in this case, the trip there is more than half the fun. The best songs on Are the Dark Horse are those that build, chugging uphill in great swirling torrents full of distortion, sweeping violins and airy vocals, which at their best are redolent of The Beach Boys on a trip to the mountains. The best of these is the first, “Disaster,” which starts simply with a voice and a strum and builds upon itself concentricly, charging up on a steady drum rhythm and culminating with a pulsing series of violin stabs that sound like the first notes of a burglar alarm. This is not say the rest of the album is a downhill trip. Are the Dark Horse returns repeatedly from the bed of fuzz it lies down for itself, cresting proudly on high peaks of divine sound before sinking again into a murk populated by a thousand other bands.
4 STARS
of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? – Polyvinyl Records
Lyrically, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, of Montreal’s tenth album, seems at times their darkest, entrenched in the near-eternal black of a long Norwegian winter. But Kevin Barnes has shown before that his heart bleeds hot pink blood laced with glitter, and Hissing Fauna, the closest the band will probably ever come to a break-up album, is awash with usual fizzy soundscapes. The seeming weight of the lyrics is offset by a constant theme of irreverence, with rebukes to “faggy” girls and a reference to the “CCAA booty patrol.” All this culminates with the ridiculous funk swagger of Labyrinthian Pomp, where Barnes decides “let’s just say, you are not the destroyer.” They may flirt with despair, but of Montreal remains a band who’s yet to meet a problem they couldn’t dance away.
4 STARS
Tin Hat – The Sad Machinery of Spring – Hannibal Records
Jazz may seem like a dead entity in modern music. But like classical and others of that same instrumental ilk, it’s really just hiding, lurking under the surface of a dozen other mashed-up sub-genres. In many ways, modern music is characterized not by creation but by amalgamation, and some of the most satisfying results of such in recent memory are found on The Sad Machinery of Spring, the latest album by Tin Hat. Here, the dead genres of the past flower like graveyard daisies – slender, delicate melodies that shine with newfound resonance. Sad Machinery casts spring in a way that only someone who has known winter can. This is clearest on “The Secret Fluid of Deusk,” where violin and horns dance circles around each other, combining the spritely lilt of free jazz trumpets with the mournful sighs of Eastern European strings – a bittersweet collusion that thrusts up beautifully through the cruelness of April.
4.5 STARS
