Welcome, Guest

Staff Picks

See All

The Besnard Lakes

The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse

Email This

Review

Rated

by Merlin on 03/15/2007

You got Beach Boys on my Pink Floyd. No, you got Pink Floyd in my Beach Boys. F*ck it! They taste good together! Let’s go smoke some weed...

The stoner album can be many things to many people. For some folks it might be 60’s free jazz. Other connoisseurs may well go for ambient soundscapes. And still others go for the classics. Dark Side of the Moon may be the most famous, or infamous—depending on your disposition. Pink Floyd (outside of anything with Syd Barrett) use to be a dirty word in the hipster household. That’s not the case anymore. More and more indie bands are adopting the melancholy, general grandiosity, and bluesy guitar solos that marked early '70’s Floyd. Add to that a touch of Brian Wilson sensibility and you’ve got one smokin’ album. (cough... cough...)

The Besnard Lakes hail from Montreal (Who doesn’t at this point?). The scope and mood of The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse may remind some of a certain other Montreal band that amazingly debuted its second album at #2 on the Billboard 200. However, comparisons are shaky at best. The Besnard Lakes are their own animal—a horse in this case—and with stand-out tracks like “Disaster,” “For Agent 13,” and “And You Lied To Me,” they prove their worth.

...Are The Dark Horse is an ostentatious rock album and outside of their relatively weak ode to Williamsburg, Brooklyn—“On Bedford and Grand”—a very successful one. I still can’t decide if that song is tongue in cheek or not with the lyric: “You wouldn’t believe the things that we saw / When we took the hell train / The centre of culture / Capital.” To be fair though, I probably thought the same thing the first time I stepped off the L train.

Add Comment