The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night

Right now no one is making music this grand, this big, this moving with so much assurance.

With Are the Roaring Night they delve deeper into the glittering soundscapes that have become synonymous with their sound; sacrificing something of the warmth that marked their previous work, they nonetheless emerge with a thoroughly impressive, coherent whole.

A ten track album sequenced as two sides, with short introductory ambient noise pieces in slots one and six, the tracks drone on long and stand tall together, creating a monolithic listening experience which feels both constantly building and already there.

Are The Roaring Night is by no means a perfect record, and there are minor flaws to stand alongside the frequent moments of brilliance, but what cannot be questioned is how skilled they are at shaping layers of sound to form an enveloping whole, with each overlapping texture or shifting tempo plunging the listener further and further into the darkness.

You won't find a more compelling wall of sound in many other places this year.

But even weaker songs are still not a wasted trip, flickering with sharp moments and dazzling effects. In this way, the album asserts itself as a refreshingly pointed piece of chamber pop, a starkly serious work that plays as big but never portentous.

If you strip their sound to its core, like the harmonies and the distortion, you’re left with an invariable rock record. If this isn’t a true representation of what modern rock should be, I don't know what is.

The music more than matches The Besnard Lakes' cinematic ambition. [Apr 2010, p.81]

The Besnard Lakes roll note after note, moment after moment, song after song that build in anticipation, spectacle, and beauty. [Winter 2010, p.62]

More muscular, less ethereal than 2007's "...Are The Dark Horse," it is no less exciting. [Apr 2010, p.99]

The enveloping crescendos of "Albatross" define the album's blend of beauty and pure power in a record that puts "classic" back into classic rock. [Apr 2010, p.106]

Are the Roaring Night sounds richer, and while it doesn't rewrite the formula, it contains many small refinements to the band's songwriting and production skills.

Roaring Night is an immersive, captivating experience, beautifully lush yet uncompromisingly powerful.

The Besnard Lakes amp up the energy with a more guitar-driven approach on third album The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night. But this added vigor doesn't distract from the rock band's more familiar fare of gentle vocal deliveries and downplayed drums.

The geeky technique on Roaring Night occasionally trumps its simple pleasures. But it's sort of like a serious foodie restaurant: Take time to savor it, and you'll be transported.

This Montreal orchestral rock combo's previous efforts were lush and woozy, like a half-remembered dream, but Roaring Night is the stuff of nightmares.

Are The Roaring Night brings the Montreal group’s potential down to earth, expanding what were sweeping, almost classical compositions into gut-wrenching, prog-y panoramas. A lot of the same cerebral, chamber-music-meets-guitar-wash elements are still there; they’re just a bit beefier this time.

With Jace Lasek's glistening falsetto intertwining with wife Olga Goreas' dreamy midrange pipes, the Montreal group's third album, The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night, creates a nocturnal viobe in broad daylight. [Apr 2010, p.122]

Goreas’s more prominent vocal role provides a payoff that helps to balance the moments on this album where the group’s musical ideas aren’t quite as seamless as on its predecessor.

Call it Sigur Rós meets Supertramp in the end, perhaps most especially on the penultimate number, "Light Up the Night," with its keyboard-led opening moving into a slow sweet-sounding swagger of an arrangement thanks again to a big beat and guitar chug, but the signs of that kind of sonic grandness, if not full on grandiosity, abound.