CD Odyssey Disc 1874: Great Lake Swimmers

Happy All Saint’s Day! I hope everyone navigated the horrors of Hallowe’en emerging soul intact, and house unhaunted (or at least no more haunted than when the day began).

This next band just played live in my hometown, but unfortunately I already had tickets to the Beaches on the same night. It seems the universe wanted me to listen to them one way or another and contrived to have me roll this next record.

Or, more likely, it was just a random coincidence. Either way, here we are.

Disc 1874 is… Bodies and Minds

Artist: Great Lake Swimmers

Year of Release: 2005

What’s up with the Cover? What could have been a lovely nature photo is marred by someone getting creative. I find this strip-slicing and adjusting about as enjoyable as when Netflix doesn’t load properly, or when my TV pixilates.

How I Came To Know It: Periodically, I dig through my local record store’s bargain bin, where all you see can be had for the low price of $3 per CD. It’s usually a barren wasteland of castaways, but every now and then something intrigues. I already owned (and liked) two later albums by the Great Lake Swimmers, so when I saw this record poking out from the ruins and decided to give it a chance.

How It Stacks Up: I have three Great Lake Swimmers albums. “Bodies and Minds” comes in at #1, bumping 2012’s “New Wild Everywhere” (reviewed back at Disc 966) down to second.

Ratings: 4 stars

Welcome to the intimate and pastoral poetry of the Great Lake Swimmers. If you are feeling the need to chill out and Think Deep Thoughts, you’ve come to the right place.

“Bodies and Minds” is the second album released by this fine collection of indie folk musicians from Ontario, and while early in their career their style and approach to music is already fully realized. Moreover, some of the fuzzier production decisions on later records are not present here, making for a crisper and – to my ear – more accessible and compelling sound.

It all starts with lead singer and songwriter Tony Dekker’s haunting vocals. His voice is incredibly high and breathy, with a tone that is confessional and authentic.

It’s a voice built for artsy and poetic language and Dekker offers plenty of it. The natural world as symphony in “When It Flows”:

“The subtle piano raindrops
The creaking of he buildings and their cellos
The wind was our violin
The sky was a symphony mural of the stars”

Or the seductive directness of “Various Stages”:

“I have seen you in various stages of undress
I have seen you through various states of madness”

The poetry is everywhere and while it sometimes feels a bit university lit, I happen to like university lit, making this a feature not a bug.

Holding and building space around Dekker’s words and vocals is a band that knows how to sit gently in a pocket and create a mood. Nothing is played loud or aggressive, and everyone finds their comfort spot. Well orchestrated and impeccably timed, but less ‘dark suits and straight-backed chairs’ and more ‘t-shirts on the living room couch’.

While Great Lake Swimmings plays as a team, special shout out to Erik Arneson on banjo on this record. On “Let’s Trade Skins” his light but artful touch on the banjo elevates the record and is the perfect counterpoint to Dekker’s high tenor.

“Bodies and Minds” felt different depending on whether I was listening during the day, or at night. By day, it was a quiet walk on the lakeshore, by night the ghostly keen of innermost secrets of the heart. It makes sense, as Dekker consistently draws in the natural world around him and uses it to help interpret whatever musings he may be having. These musings are deep and serious. Not “what shall I have for lunch?” and more “what’s the secret of the universe and how do I fit into it?”

My first coupe of listens to this album were in my rather ‘growly’ car. This is NOT the best way to enjoy any Great Lake Swimmers record. This is music that requires quiet and time for contemplation to steal its way into your heart. Knowing I was missing something, I put some time aside this morning to just grok it on the headphones.

It was a good decision, as that’s how this music is intended. Take your time and let it mist around you.

Best tracks: Let’s Trade Skins, Various Stages, Bodies and Minds, To Leave It Behind, Imaginary Bars, I Saw You In the Wild

CD Odyssey Disc 966: Great Lake Swimmers

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