Feb 24 2010 3:07 pm, Daniel Ross
Montreal’s The Besnard Lakeshave recorded a delicious, atmospheric new album that harks back to concept-led dinosaurs of old – there’s a continuing narrative from their previous album with well-defined characters – but a vigour and crispness that locates them in the modern world. It’s shoegaze-influenced, but only musically. This is complex, emotional stuff, as much an album defined by its tone as it is by its sound. In a stroke of perfect naming, they’ve called it 'The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night'. On record they certainly are, but over the phone husband ‘n’ wife duo Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas are exceptionally personable and excited to talk about their various new projects – soundtracking Mark Ruffalo’s new film and working with Swervedriver’s Adam Franklin.
Could you explain a little bit about the narrative of the new album?
Olga: There’s a continuing narrative that’s been there since our first album. It’s more what Jace draws on for inspiration lyrically and in terms of an overall theme. The idea is a spy who was around in the 40s and 50s, and has this story of following another spy, like a double-agent kind of character in the present day. There’s this element of whether it’s real or not real, and now it seems the spy is a musician – and apparently not a very good one. He’s also receiving these messages from short-wave radio, which is something that we’ve always had as well, these snippets of transmissions in our songs.
There’s not quite as many of those transmissions on this new record though, is there?
O: I guess the beginning of ‘Land of the Living Skies’ has a whole bunch of them, but yeah. It’s still something that we riff off as a general theme. For me, where I get my inspiration from is different from Jace. I always take from personal experiences, I have books and journals that I’ve kept from when I was fairly young. I just looked at these stories, and they just seem to present themselves in such a way that it ends up fitting into the theme of the narrative that we’re following. For example, ‘Albatross’ is a song about my experiences when I was living in Vancouver, and this person I met who kind-of paved the way for me to enter a life of music, and took me out and around town, we’d play on the streets together. He was basically a down and out homeless guy who would say, y’know, “you gotta come play some Pixies songs with me!” and I’d be like “ok, sure…” At this time I’d just picked up the bass, we started to play songs and learn covers. It was my first tangible way into the world of music that I’m still involved in.
The album artwork is slightly different from the norm in that it’s extremely literal – it’s literally a picture of a Roaring Night. Similarly, your last record, 'The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse', features explanatory artwork.
Jace: The original idea for the artwork came one night when I came home and ‘The Omen’ was on. I just turned the TV on at the moment when Damien’s nanny jumps off the roof of the mansion and hangs herself, and I was completely blown away by this image of this person hanging in front this mansion. I did a little Google image search for a still of that scene and I found this amazing still of the character hanging in front of the broken mansion window, and I was like, “THAT’S the cover of the record”. We went to our label and our lawyers, and they were like, “yeah, that might be kind-of tricky…”, and we were like “what if we paint it?” and they were like “yeah, it still might be kind-of bizarre”, so we thought “fuck, back to the drawing board”. What ended up happening was that we commissioned the person who did the painting of ‘Dark Horse’, Cory Lane Cats. I’d been looking at 17th century wartime paintings and I’d actually considered maybe doing something like that for 'Dark Horse', and I found this one really amazing painting of ships at battle at sea. Some of the debris from the ships had been painted in, and it was on fire so it looked like the water was on fire. That’s really cool, because we’re still dealing with the idea of fire and war, and the lyrics are dealing with war and spies, and the band is called The Besnard Lakes, so it seemed really fitting. We found a really cool alternative that fit in really well, and the same goes for the title of the record.
'The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night'
We were going to call it ‘Let The Night Roar’, but what happened was about three months before we were to settle on the artwork there was another band that came out with their record, and it was called ‘Let The Night Roar’, and we also found out that there was a band in Boston called Let The Night Roar. It’s a Jim Jones quote, and we loved those words together, but we didn’t want to associate ourselves with Jim Jones so much, so we thought about taking the idea of ‘The Besnard Lakes Are…’ system, and committing to it. I guess the alternative ended being really good for us, because the title becomes our own instead of a direct quote from somebody else.
So what will the next one be?
J: I keep making this joke that it’s going to be ‘The Besnard Lakes Are Broke’, or ‘The Besnard Lakes Are At Wits’ End’.
There’s a real sense of tension and release within the songs, every dark moment has a light equivalent.
J: When that initial ‘Omen’ cover came up in my mind I thought I wanted to make a really dark, evil album, and I wanted it to be tougher. Even though the cover of the album changed, it’s still quite menacing and dark. ‘Dark Horse’ was kind-of like that, but still light, I wanted to create more of an ominous atmosphere. I think the tension and release thing is something that I’ve really been enamoured of since I was a kid listening to records. I love the whole quiet-loud thing, songs that are long and take you on a journey and are really dense, then lighten up a bit. Even having sections that are over-indulgent, I’ve always been really enamoured of stuff like that.
Quite coincidentally, I was interviewing Efrim Menuck recently and he seemed to think that Montreal has something of a community feel to it, with lots of artists ‘in it together’, so to speak.
O: Yeah, definitely. We get questions a lot more along the lines of ‘since Montreal’, and since all these bands like Arcade Fire became successful, and do you think there’s a theme. There is something that is there still, and if anything it’s probably gotten stronger in the last two or three years. I think Jace would say the same thing, that there’s not one particular sound that comes from Montreal. You can kind of maybe hear some similarities, but Arcade Fire doesn’t sound like Wolf Parade, doesn’t sound like Silver Mt. Zion. I think that’s crucial, a major strength. Very authentic. Further to that, Montreal is a pretty big city, but it’s not huge. You run into everyone in the same neighbourhood, and it helps foster a feeling of community.
J: I definitely agree. I hold Efrim in very high esteem, the whole Constellation/Godspeed thing, whether or not people are conscious of it, the whole scene developed around their philosophies and ideas. Godspeed were a band who were always into experimenting, even alienating. Taking risks, pushing the boundaries on what songs actually are. When I was living in Vancouver and going to art school from 97-99, I was buying Constellation records stuff not even really knowing that it was from Canada. I couldn’t believe that these beautiful albums were being recognised internationally. So I was like, “fuck, we gotta check out what’s going on over there,” because it was so incredible. Montreal comes from a very rich history of musique concrete and musique actuale and the experimental music festival that happens there every year. I think that’s what all the bands in Montreal have in common whether they know it or not. They’re always trying to push the boundaries of music, and I think that’s the only thing that binds the bands together.
Does it ever get competitive?
O: I don’t ever get that feeling that it’s overtly competitive, but who’s to say not inwardly, right? You never really know. And why not? It fuels the creative fire and makes for better artistry.
You’ve recently completed recording the soundtrack to Mark Ruffalo’s new film – a lot of people would say that the function of the soundtrack is to almost be a subconscious recording. What do you think? O: Yeah, definitely. I think a soundtrack that is very well executed will never ever overtake the narrative and the story. There’s definitely something there that’s happening at a very subliminal level. It’s basically manipulating your emotions. I think that would make for a very great film experience, to have a soundtrack that is doing something that you don’t realise it’s doing to you. I had that in mind when we were working on ‘Sympathy For Delicious’. There were times when we knew a scene needed something and we needed an extra motif. It does seem to work really at a gut level in terms of composition. I would really love to do it again. Now that you’ve seen the whole thing, what do you think of it? O: I think it’s a great movie, it’s kind of interesting. It’s about a man who’s in a wheelchair who’s a DJ, and he suddenly develops this ability to heal people but he cannot heal himself. It plays out in such a way that there’s a few twists and turns along the way, obviously. It has a great ending to it, Juliette Lewis is great in it as the bass-playing rock chick, so yeah, I have praise for the movie. J: We always thought The Besnard Lakes would be perfect for scoring a film, but Mark Ruffalo was the first guy to actually put us to work on it. It was an honour to do. It’s pretty cool seeing how putting a few chords together can completely change the way a visual scene is interpreted. He came to visit us and spent the weekend in the studio, after we finished the score, and he totally gave us license to interpret it the way we wanted to. There were a couple of bits that he got us to refine, based on the way the characters were carrying themselves. To be able to watch, to see how a director is actually perceiving the way he wants an actor to convey emotion and have the music help that out was a revelation to me. I know Mark has a really strong underground following. I remember when he was visiting us we were walking down the street, and for the most part people weren’t recognising him. There was this one 70-year-old dude who passed us, then stopped and turned and said “you’re that guy!”. I got to watch Mark put his head down and be like, “aww shucks,” and the guy was finally like “you’re Mark Ruffalo! Keep making great films!”. Mark’s special, he’s a great actor and a really sweet dude, and I think that comes across on the screen. I hear you’ve worked with Adam Franklin of Swervedriver – what was that like? J: Well, he contacted us about six or eight months ago and he was putting together a solo record. There was a song he had done which needed a little bit more, and did The Besnard Lakes want to collaborate on it. We were totally blown away. We’d met him before and knew he was a fan, but the whole band are massive Swervedriver fans too. I grew up absolutely adoring them, so it was a bit of a dream come true. When he asked us… it was beyond our expectations. So we got the song, I added some vocal harmony, Olga added some bass and some flute, Rich and Kevin added some drums and some guitar. We just got the mix back and it sounds great, so that will probably come out in the next six months. Hopefully we get to play some shows together. 'The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night' is released on Jagjaguwar on March 8th.
