You know, I was not expecting to like this album. The Montreal husband and wife team of Olga Goreas and Jace Lasek have been getting a whole heap of love for this, their third album, and I wasn’t sure that the hype could live up to it.
How very wrong I was. I have a real love of shoegazing music (and the likes of Ride, Chapterhouse, Lush and obviously, My Bloody Valentine hold a special place in my music collection, on vinyl, natch). The idea of them mixing it with Americana, and with Brian Wilson Beach Boy vocals surely couldn’t work – but it does. In Montreal the sound of seventies California meets the early nineties home counties and boy is this an album to treasure. Right from start to finish, they barely put a foot wrong.
Frankly, there’s so many great tracks on here that there’s no point in just cherry picking a few – and if you’re the sorta person who only buys a few tracks off of albums instead of buying the whole thing (and shame on you, frankly), you should really make an exception here. ‘Albatross’ is buzzing around the net as we speak, but there’s over highlights such as the opening, two-part ‘Like The Ocean, Like The Innocent’ and ‘And This Is What We Call Progress.’
So, I’ve learned to listen without prejudice. Watch this band make the blogosphere and the wider listening world fall under their sway, like fellow Canadians The Arcade Fire before them. The likelihood of this doing well in the end of year polls is pretty much a given even at this early stage. and best of all, when the album finishes – you want to play it again, right away.
