The Besnard Lakes are more than a band whose name kind of looks like "Barenaked Ladies" if you look at it really fast. They're also a four-piece from Montreal, centered on husband Jace Lasek (lead vocals and guitar) and wife Olga Goreas (vocals and bass). Yeah, a married Canadian couple—sounds like a recipe for charming yet toothless twee pop.
But though the vocals are as sweet as you'd expect, the noisy exploration of songs like "Albatross" (the first single from their third and latest studio album, this year's The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night) packs significant sonic punch, calling to mind psychedelic rock and the shoegaze of Jesus and Mary Chain. (Quebec is one of the edgier provinces, after all.)
The Besnard Lakes recently branched out into the world of film, scoring this year's festival-circuit piece Sympathy for Delicious, the directorial debut of actor Marc Ruffalo. The supernatural thriller/drama about a paralyzed DJ has gotten pretty negative reviews, but that's just about the only bad press the Besnard Lakes have gotten this year. Roaring Night has received practically universal critical acclaim, something that hasn't happened too often to their countrymen and brothers-in-initials Barenaked Ladies.
