The most mindful ‘reverb drenched guitar sound aficionados’ will most likely recall the experimental shoegaze trio from Ottawa, Wood Lake, consisting of Harry McGuire (guitar/vocals), Colin Boudreault (bass) and Rhian Meaney (drums), with two very promising albums under their belt, straddling between 2014 and 2016.
The latter “Hell”, reviewed at the time by Fabrizio here, despite its indisputable value, perhaps ended up disappointing those who expected an LP along the lines of the two enticing earlier singles, “Head in the Sand” and “Hollow”, certainly energetic and noisy, albeit with a distinctive ‘pop’ quality.
The fact is that the band, apart from a parenthesis of an isolated EP in 2018, actually a solo venture of Harry McGuire, had some ‘gone missing, until the good news of the last few days with the announcement of the upcoming release of their third full-length album, “Mer Bleue”, due out, on digital, September 25, 2020.
The new record, in addition to featuring all the three original members, also includes the artistic input of live collaborator since 2015, Paige Genest (piano / double bass), and promises of seeking to maintain the best aspects of previous releases, while simultaneously including new instruments and production techniques for a novel and engaging listening experience.
The first single/video, “Lost Meaning” is definitely the heaviest song from the lot with mainly an indie/shoegaze sound, while the chorus draws a lot of inspiration from ambient music, like the rest of the album.
Hazy, slightly abrasive guitar melodies reverb and scrape over a deep digging groovy bass line marked by steady nimble drum beats with flashing cymbals, as anxiously restless male vocal’s lost and lonely in the heart of nocturnal city maze, give way to a dramatic chorus cast in field recordings that envelop you in the intense energy of passing cars, howling winds, and an ominous book drop underlaid by trembling piano notes before pounding rhythms and serpentine glowing restrained 6-string chimes pick up the urgent pace and run down the deserted streets till the end of the night.
Poetic lyrics use personification to breathe life into an urban landscape, eliciting palpable feelings of claustrophobia with intense emotional descriptions such as “The frightful raging sea of glass, steel, and concrete roars and turns in its unrest.”
The time-lapse video takes a high-speed journey through the dark streets of Warsaw, Poland maintaining a constant flow of motion through a dizzying maze of thoroughfares and dead-end roads to awaken an unsettling stream of consciousness laced in angsty isolation. Dim skylights blur into suffocating shadows during an eye-opening interlude, exposing disquieting disorientation under the railroad crossing’s paralytic glow.
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