The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night

You can only be the dark horse once. The Besnard Lakes may have been a (mostly) unknown quantity when they broke out to a wider audience in 2007, but they were also insiders of sorts-- guitarist/vocalist Jace Lasek had done production work with Montreal heavyweights Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown. Fitting of its title, Are the Dark Horse had a subtle, almost shy, quality-- on many songs, the group's quiet side slowly swelled into a symphony. On the follow-up, Are the Roaring Night, husband-and-wife duo Lasek and Olga Goreas map out a sonic landscape that follows the peaks and valleys of their previous work, but the terrain is more ragged.