The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse
- The Besnard Lakes
- Band Name: The Besnard Lakes
- Record Label: Jagjaguwar
- Release Date: Feb 20, 2007
- Critic Score
- Most active
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Their overarching fingernail-meets-chalkboard eeriness... is what prevents a lapse into the preciousness that sometimes accompanies orchestrated indie rock, making the album a rousing success. [#16, p.90]
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That music so majestically restrained in pace can make your heart beat so quickly is a testament to The Besnard Lakes' focus and ability to coat each millisecond of track time with an utterly captivating sound without ever becoming clogged up with their myriad ideas.
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90An amazing album. [Mar 2007, p.75]
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90These are explosive epics that don't get tired, tied together in an album that's both instantly accessible and grows on you over time.
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So sure, yet another band of bombast, largesse, room-sound gone cathedral, but either way the Besnard Lakes have mastered their songcraft with this psychedelic oddity, which fits all too well with other wintry early-year indie releases.
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82The Dark Horse shares [the debut's] deliberate sense of pacing, precious attention to detail and hermetic sound-world atmosphere; the difference here is that almost every song builds to a crucial moment where the Besnards bravely step out of the shadows, and in the process, transform from being a merely good band to a great one.
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80Heroic, monumental and wondrously sensual.
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It's like a Beach Boys album when it's calm and a Queen album when it's crunchy, but all filtered through what must be one hell of a record collection over at the Goreas-Lasek homestead.
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80Too big in their influences and scope to fit in even the biggest pigeonhole imaginable, The Besnard Lakes thankfully produce music chock-full of tunes and spine-tingly loveliness not seen since The Beach Boys or more recently the sheer joy and ridiculous grandeur of The Polyphonic Spree.
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80Throughout, interest is held with dynamic and textural changes, more than an inherently riveting musical idea. But the album's much more than just stoned jams.
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80Taken as a whole, The Besnard Lakes display a unique style, a winning combination of intriguing songwriting and diverse arrangements.
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The Besnard Lakes have perfected psychedelic harmonies and slurring melodies, but they're so much bigger than that.
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Moments of beauty cut through the bleakness.
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70Intriguing, unpredictable and far from ordinary. [Mar 2007, p.110]
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70Rarely has dispiritedness sounded so uplifting. [Mar 2007, p.88]
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Their flutters of effects, long, frosted periods of sonic dormancy, pefectly balanced twin vocals, and general sense of space set them apart from the herd with a surety you only see in the elite.
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Sift through Are the Dark Horse and the sounds of the Beach Boys or Orbison can certainly be found, but the band has yet to learn the clean, economical songwriting of their influences.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 25 out of 30
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Mixed: 3 out of 30
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Negative: 2 out of 30
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TimC.9Loved it!
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JoelZ.10One of those albums I largely was unimpressed with at first listen but 10 listens later blown away, so intricate and beautiful.
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PeterM.10Every listening reveals more of the sonic and melodic complexity of a whole that is gloriously more than the sum of its parts