Every track is generous, beautiful, and essential. If you use music as medicine, this record will give you what you need. If you want to be overtaken, transported, and delivered safely back home, TBLATLOTGTW is yours.
On ...Last Of The Great Thunderstorm Warnings, we hear The Besnard Lakes make a very contemporary take on psychedelic music; wise to rock history but not in thrall to it, more interested in asking the big questions than senselessly adding to the canon.
Thunderstorm Warnings doesn't put a foot wrong, delivering the big music with heart instead of bluster.
The Besnard Lakes have always seemed to do whatever they wanted to but this album feels different. It’s defiantly inspired. The band is constantly flexing their muscles throughout, harmonically and melodically.
It's an album that will delight the band's fanbase, and there are some powerful and profound moments with arrangements that are beyond the realms of what would be considered standard rock music. This is serious music taking on weighty themes.
Wisely abandoning the dissonant switch-ups of 2016's A Coliseum Complex Museum, Thunderstorm Warnings takes everything the Besnard Lakes have ever done well and provides it in abundance.
Of course, Thunderstorm Warnings has enough excellence going for it that no matter how much growth they display, the record is still a delight to spend time with.
Overall, The Besnard Lakes Are The Last Of The Great Thunderstorm Warnings comes across like a hard rock, prog-inclined Mercury Rev. Idiosyncratic, oblique and suffocating.
If you listen carefully you can still hear the delay from the guitars fading away in the distance.
A slow progressing, mostly instrumental neo-psychedelia album which I probably won't listen to again. But it still has some good songs included.
Fav Songs: Blackstrap, The Dark Side of Paradise, The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings
#61 | / | Uncut |