Rock
- The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night
- The Besnard Lakes
- Jagaguwar/Outside
- Three stars
They called their stunning 2007 album The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse, but the Montrealers are no longer under-recognized. Now these pristine psychedelic rocksters, led by the couple Olga Goreas and Jace Lasek, are the roaring night, as in The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night. It's a moodier disc, at times, but generally not a lot different from the last one: Monophonic Beach Boys harmonies hover gorgeously, while guitars crash to a spacey-dense analog ambience. First single Albatross is interesting, with a girl-group pop song swirling within the French horns and backwards guitars. The shimmering Light Up the Night imagines Peter Cetera riding the Band of Horses. Lyrics are fairly oblique, though the last track is in the past tense, so something - a war? - has been resolved. It's a solid album, but there's no sign of growth potential. The Besnard Lakes, it would seem, are what they are.
Brad Wheeler
The Besnard Lakes play Toronto's Horseshoe Tavern on Thursday; Montreal's Il Motore on Friday.
Pop
- A Different Day
- Kinnie Starr
- Last Gang Records
- Two stars
When I first heard Kinnie Starr's music 10 years ago, she was making big, disorderly drum-and-bass tracks full of quizzical rap lyrics and pointillistic daubs of colour. Her new pop album for Last Gang (produced by Bass Is Base alumnus Chin Injeti) is different in every way. There's some good stuff here, such as Open Wounds, a quietly rollicking number with strummed electric guitar that shows us a smoother side of the old, conscious Starr; Bonfires, an intimate acoustic number and a beautifully free sense of vocal rhythm; and Another's Gone, a sultry Caribbean rewrite of Queen's Another One Bites the Dust. But it's hard to see the point of gritless love songs like It's All You and Free. Your Eyes is a pop-rock disaster that comes across like a desperate plea for radio play. Kinnie, you're better than this.
Robert Everett-Green
Spoken Word/Blues
- I'm New Here
- Gil Scott-Heron
- XL
- Three and a half stars
"Running will be the way your life and mine will be described, as in the long run, or, as in giving somebody a run for his money, or, as in running out of time." Gil Scott-Heron, the Whitey on the Moon poet and hip-hop godfather, isn't fleeing on his 13th album - he is reflective, introspective and un-agitated on a significant record of electronica-tricked dub-beat ultra-blues. Me and the Devil, a broodingly droned adaptation of Robert Johnson's 1937 Delta-blues of the same name, is soulfully sung, but much of the album's words are spoken rhythmically, in a Marlboro-mellowed burr. The gracefully finger-picked title track notwithstanding, there's a pervading sense of conclusion - an ambience of storm clouds passing rapidly over a graveyard. Not that the 60-year-old Scott-Heron is in a hurry: "Because running makes me look like everyone else," he reasons, "though I hope there will never be cause for that." Here, here.
Brad Wheeler