Pitchfork

To gauge what kind of a year the Besnard Lakes have had, you need only consider that the Montreal band was virtually unknown when they released their latest album, The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse, nine months ago, and now they've already earned their first reissue. Originally released on the band's own Break Glass imprint in 2003, Volume 1 was a patient, languid counterpoint to the frantic, anthemic pop that would soon make Montreal famous, and as such, the album did not reverberate far beyond the band's immediate circle. While their peers in Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade and the Unicorns were reshaping the city's musical landscape, the Besnards sounded more in tune with another time-honored Quebecois passion: Floydian prog-rock. As their friends embarked on North American tours, Besnards co-founders Jace Lacek and Olga Goreas had to content themselves with playing the roles of supportive parents seeing their kids off to college and holding down the fort back home (specifically, at Lacek's increasingly busy Break Glass studios).

The critical success of Dark Horse, however, has changed their stature considerably, scoring the band a Polaris Prize nomination in Canada, and an upcoming tour with Peter Bjorn and John. In light of that album's time-lapsed grandeur and swooning choruses, the title of Volume 1 now feels especially appropriate-- not just because it's the band's first album, but because it underscores the album's formative, work-in-progress feel.

Volume 1 establishes certain signifiers that would get fleshed out on Dark Horse: the patient builds, the premium placed on mood and space, and the recurring espionage theme that continues to inform Lacek's lyrics. But the album is much more austere in presentation; compared to Dark Horse's inviting nocturnal ambience and Spiritualized-like string-laden swells, Volume 1 favours chiseled, discordant guitar riffs more in line with mid-90s fretboard contortionists like Polvo. The album's duel set pieces, "Skyscraper Girls" and "You've Got to Want to Be a Star", both run nine minutes long and feel like it too, setting their jangly, downcast refrains atop sluggish tempos and a bedrock of ominous drones as cold and imposing as slabs of concrete. And Lacek had yet to develop the courage to show off the weepy falsetto that propelled Dark Horse's most affecting moments ("For Agent 13", "Because Tonight"), favouring a monotone mumble that's buried deep in the mix-- which just goes to show that it takes cajones to sing like you don't got any.

So the real rewards here come with picking out hints of what's to come: in its final two minutes, "Skyscraper Girls" introduces a squealing guitar solo that foreshadows the climactic, arena-rocking coda of Dark Horse's "And You Lied to Me"; the hazy girl-group harmonies of "This Thing" would later fully flourish on Goreas' sludge-metal showstopper "Devastation". Volume 1 is also notable for showing the paths that the Besnards have since chosen not to follow, namely with the urgent, agitated Breeders-style distorto-pop of "Thomasina," driven by Goreas' "Cannonball"-sized bass groove. But if Volume 1 sounds very much like a debut effort-- both in its streamlined mid-fi production and exploratory, sometimes directionless drift-- its closing track spells out the Besnards' future: "Life Rarely Begins With the Tungsten Film #1" may be a mouthful, but its space-bound guitar charge and dreamily ascending melody show the way to the Besnards' second volume.