The third studio album from underappreciated Canucks The Besnard Lakes may not be the most essential thing you've heard all year, but it's a pleasurable, if somewhat directionless listen nonetheless.
While their contemporaries around them have flourished internationally, The Besnard Lakes remain the quiet heroes of the Canadian music scene. Based around husband-wife duo Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas, the quartet have been making slow-moving, atmospheric albums that glisten and twinkle since 2003, with comparably little commercial acclaim. But the difference between the Montreal band and their fellow Canucks Arcade Fire, The Dears, Broken Social Scene and Stars is that The Besnard Lakes don't make commercially appealing albums – perhaps purposely.
Their third album is a further demonstration of that presumption, but that's not to say that a lot of '… Are the Roaring Night' isn't completely engrossing. 'Glass Printer' and 'Albatross' are especially mesmerising, the former's loud, blurry track not stripping the melody of its beauty, the latter an exercise in weird, scratchy, feedback-addled lo-fi folk. 'Light Up the Night' takes a softer tack, utilising the band's ability to harmonise as well as Fleet Foxes to create an experimental, almost proggy take on Robin Pecknold et al's sound.
'The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night' is undoubtedly a beautiful album that steers a course through wobbly guitar riffs, folk-swollen harmonies, scatty pyschedelia and richy, woozy shoegaze – but it's perhaps an album to drift off to, rather than one to listen to obsessively. It is, however, definitely worth 46.5 minutes of your late night listening session.
