THE BESNARD LAKES - The Besnard Lakes are the Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings (DINKED NO.77)

Description

• 140g orange / red splatter 2LP *
• 1-sided orange flexi disc featuring exclusive track “Superego” *
• Hand-numbered sleeve *
• Limited edition of 500

*exclusive to Dinked Edition

Released by Full time hobby.

The Besnard Lakes have passed through death and they’r e here to tell the tale. Nearly five years

after their last lightning-tinted volley, the magisterial Montreal psych-rock band have sworn off

compromise, split with their long-standing label, and completed a searing, 72-minute suite about

the darkness of dying and the light on the other side.

The Besnard Lakes Are The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings is the group’s sixth album and

the first in more than 15 years to be released away from a certain midwestern American indie

record company. After 2016’s A Coliseum Complex Museum - which saw Jace Lasek and Olga

Goreas attempting shorter, less sprawling songs - the Besnards and their label decided it was time

to go their separate ways; with that decision came a question of whether to even continue the

project at all. What use is a band with an instinct for long, tectonic tunes - rock songs with chthonic

heft and ethereal grace, five or 10 or 18 minutes long? How do you sell that in an age of bite-sized

streaming? How do you make it relevant?

“Who gives a shit!” the Besnard Lakes realized. Ignited by their love for each other, for playing

music together, the sextet found themselves unspooling the most uncompromising recording of

their career. Despite all its grandeur, …The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings honours the

very essence of punk rock: the notion that a band need only be relevant to itself. At last the

Besnard Lakes have crafted a continuous long-form suite: nine tracks that could be listened

together as one, like Spiritualized’s Lazer Guided Melodies or even Dark Side of the Moon,

overflowing with melody and harmony, drone and dazzle, the group’s own unique weather.

Here now, the Besnard Lakes finally dispensed with the two/three-year album cycle, taking all the

time they needed to conceive, compose, record and mix their opus. Some of its songs were old,

resurrected from demos cast aside years ago. Others were literally woodshedded in the cabanon

behind Lasek and Goreas’s “Rigaud Ranch” - invented and reinvented, relishing this rougher sound.

Some of that distortion makes its way into the final mix: an incandescent crackle that had receded

from the Besnards’ more recent output.

Rightly - nay, definitively! - The Besnard Lakes Are The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings is

a double LP. “Near Death” is the title of the first side. “Death,” “After Death,” and “Life” follow

next. It’s literally a journey into (and back from) the brink: the story of the Besnard Lakes’ own

odyssey but also a remembrance of others’, especially the death of Lasek’s father in 2019. Being on

your deathbed is perhaps the most psychedelic trip you can go on: in Lasek’s father’s case, he

surfaced from a morphine dream to talk about “a window” on his blanket, with “a carpenter inside,

making intricate objects.” That experience pervades the album, catching fire on the song

“Christmas Can Wait”; elsewhere the band pays tribute to the late Mark Hollis and, on “The Father

of Time Wakes Up,” they mourn the death of Prince.

In these scorched and pitted times, as the world smoulders, there might be nothing less trendy

than an hour-long psych-rock epic by a band of Canadian grandmasters. Then again, there might

be nothing we need more. …The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings is a bright-blazing

requiem: nine tunes that are one tune and six musicians who make one band - unleashed and

unconstrained, piercing and t