The Besnard Lakes took the stage around midnight on Sunday at TT’s for the final performance of an eight-week tour. The PA hummed and squealed with the static-riven introduction to their magnificent new album, The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night. Jace Lasek, who looks eerily, gleefully like Spinal Tap’s David St Hubbins, sidled up to the mic fingering a childish figure on his keyboard, and let loose his uncanny, piercing falsetto, as improbable and inhuman as the feedback squall it surfed. A few seconds later, the wave crashed so hard Lasek bust a string.
The Lakes didn’t look heartbroken to be getting off the road. The first round of Jagermeister shots went well, the band greeting the approaching end by banging out the cataclysmic riff on “Disaster” with never-again abandon.
The second round--foisted upon them by tourmates Land of Talk--had mixed results. Lasek was untroubled, impassively nailing every turn of his billowing, cloud-harmonied melodies. Bassist Olga Goreas--a fraction the size of anyone else on the band--was more shaken than stirred, wrestling with her outsized instrument and eventually subsiding, eyes closed, into a swaying, precarious groove. Lasek, Goreas’ husband, looked over and commented, cheerfully, “Olgy’s loaded like a freight train!”
Perhaps because of the relationship at its core, it’s hard not to look for similes between the band members and their music--the skeins of Beach-Boy harmonies that swoon somewhere between suspicion and serenity, swept up in serial blasts of noisy overdrive. It’s as though Slint backed the Bee Gees for a night, and enjoyed it.
The new songs, constructed with ship-in-a-bottle attention, were often more invitingly fleshed out by a strung-out four piece. “Glass Printer,” Sphinx-like on record, was faster, more recklessly jubilant. While the surfer Boys is the go-to comparison, the fourpiece recalled the hairier intimacies of Crosby Stills Nash & Young. The opening to “Chicago Train,” with all four band members in plangent close harmony and Lasek wailing like a train whistle in between, enacted the extreme delicacy at the core of most Lakes songs; then pulverized it with reverb chugging like a goods train crossing the plains. Goreas, half-submerged, delivered the cynical sting of “And This Is What We Call Progress” like a drunken truth.
When the lights came up, very early on Monday morning, the PA leapt into the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn't It Be Nice,” and we stumbled home planning to sleep long and hard.
Fellow Canadians and lovers of reverb Land of Talk accompanied the Lakes for the tour and were also in end of road form. Lasek joined them to sing along to Elizabeth Powell’s serpentine strumming and grinning dubbed them “my favorite band,” cheering and refusing to permit them to leave the stage until well after the Lakes’ starting time.
