I’m in the middle of a weekend
full of fun social events. Things began with the Victoria Film Festival’s
opening gala, where I met a documentary film maker, a horror film maker and a
music promoter and learned something from every one of them. I wanted to meet actor/writer/director
Don McKellar but I knew I would just go on about “Highway 61” (soundtrack
reviewed way back at Disc 230) and he was going to want to discuss his
latest film. We creative types are always occupied with whatever we’ve got on
the go right now. For me, that’s this next review. Shall we?
Disc 966 is…New Wild Everywhere
Artist: Great
Lake Swimmers
Year of Release: 2012
What’s up with the Cover? Birds on strings? This cover
doesn’t feel new, wild or everywhere, but I find the colour scheme soothing, so
that’s nice.
How I Came To Know It: I was introduced to the band by
my friends Cat and Ross who put one of their songs on a mixed tape of new music
they thought I’d like. That song is not on this album though. Instead, “New
Wild Everywhere” was just me getting excited that there was a new release and
buying it on a whim when it came out.
How It Stacks Up: I have two Great Lake Swimmers albums. Of those
two, “New Wild Everywhere” is my favourite.
Ratings: 3 stars
Great
Lake Swimmers are a band that I want to like more than I do. I’m drawn by their
thoughtful melodies and lyrics, but every now and then the fuzzy production
decisions keep me from becoming emotionally engaged.
“New
Wild Everywhere” features what I consider some of band leader Tony Dekker’s
strongest work, with dreamy melodies that have a stark quality that is
evocative of the windswept Canadian north. The songs feel cold and stretched, as
if all the emotions Dekker’s got bottled up inside become spread out, thin and
vulnerable when he finally lets them out.
There
are other times, when Dekker’s voice (naturally high and wispy) stretches too
much, at the expense of what are generally thoughtful and honest lyrics. Your
mind wanders a bit into the ether and loses the story. It’s like a warm bath,
but where sometimes there isn’t quite enough water in the tub.
Unhelpful
in this regard are production decisions that create a wall of sound (albeit a
very ghostly almost insubstantial wall). At its worst, it felt like a third
person in the room having Dekker whisper the lyrics in their ear and then
whispering them in mine, with some of the emotional impact getting lost in the
translation. Dekker isn’t a powerhouse singer, and anything that gets between
him and you is that much more noticeable.
However,
the production is not all bad. When it works it feels intimate, serving as a
fog bank that encourages you to listen to the stillness and feel safe while
doing it. Introspective songs like “The
Great Exhale” and “On the Water” just
sound better in the fog. It even works on the album’s most up-beat track “Easy Come, Easy Go” which doesn’t feel
like it would work as well without the fuzz.
The best
song on the album is “Ballad of a
Fisherman’s Wife” which I believe is a song about the Deepwater Horizon oil
spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Despite being only the second best song
about this event (#1 goes to Steve Earle’s “Gulf
of Mexico”) this song is a hell of a heartbreaker. It features frequent musical
shifts that help underscore the range of emotions (grief, anger, bewilderment)
that go through a woman’s mind as she tells the tale of how her livelihood has
been destroyed in a single ecological disaster. As she notes:
“The papers said this knocked us
on our knees
But we were already on our knees
They said the gulf was dead
And it was never going to come
back.”
Despite
all the tragedy and anger, the song ends with a message of hope, as the
narrator stops addressing her audience and turns her focus to her partner:
“You better hurry up and know it
I want to love you ‘til the end
of the line.”
By the
end the music is lively, and punctuated by a joyful banjo solo. The song
manages to find optimism in the love of two people, while never downplaying
just how terrible the event was for these people, and thousands like them. That
combination of the specific and the general is folk music at its best.
My album
ends with a ‘bonus’ track (which I’ll never understand – I guess you don’t get
it if you download it?) sung in French. It is pretty enough, but I think the
record would end best with “On the Water”
a song about someone having a mystical experience while battling a storm at sea.
The lyrics on this song are inspired and thoughtful, and remind us that we’re
not just one with each other, we’re one with the earth and all its creatures as
well. It felt a bit like the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, if the mariner hadn’t
shot the albatross.
“New
Wild Everywhere” is a solid record, and while I don’t put it on that often, it
has a quiet beauty that I appreciate, even if my preference would be to turn down
the fuzz so I could hear it better.
Best
tracks: New Wild
Everywhere, The Great Exhale, Easy Come Easy Go, Ballad of a Fisherman’s Wife,
On the Water
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