Eighty minutes of your precious day can be used for an impossible amount of naff things to merely pass the time but a Besnard Lakes gig should certainly not form a part of a not to do list.
At times,you got the impression during the Canadian post rock shoegaze outsiders return to Glasgow that some of the seventy or so in attendance would happily relive such an 80 minute period over and over on continuous loop.
I suppose you could say making such an impression comes naturally to the band; after all its not every day you witness such an attempt to cross pollinate shoegaze ripples with multiple layers of post rock panoramas.
Irrespective of whatever tag or label people generate about Quebec’s The Besnard Lakes its most unlikely such a description will do justice to the sound wonderfully conceived, constructed and executed by the group.
The husband and wife team of Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas that form the core of the band have been churning out space rock works of consistent excellence for the last 11 years now, rarely tinkering too far from a specific formula, indeed openly confessing to considering themselves as “basically a cover band of our own band”, something which Goreas reminds us of in Broadcast tonight.
Not that anyone is complaining as full of distortion and cuts of sampled sound The Besnard Lakes tears through ‘And This Is What We Call Progress’ with the marching of the drums only partially reinforced by those in the basement of Broadcast. “We’re just warming up, ya know” says Lasek, and he wasn’t kidding, during ‘Colour Yr Lights In’ it becomes clear that we are in the presence of more than mere musicians but rather full on melodic composers of otherworldly soundscapes.
At other junctures of the show, such as ‘People Of The Sticks’ we see Olga Goreas mostly take charge of vocal duties while her other half sets about thrashing his guitar, keys in the background, all the while maintaining stage presence as well as that certain epic feel showcased on record.
In spite of much of the material displayed (tragic ballads of espionage anyone?) the band themselves seem in high spirits, joking that they think they just have no choice but to move to Scotland.
In between all this talk of how fantastic Scotch is and amid quotes from everyone’s favourite anchorman the trippy sonic gospel remains off the scale along Sauchiehall Street way with a three pronged explosion of ’46 Satires’, ‘Disaster’ and ‘Albatross’.
Indeed with the rendition of ’46 Satires’ they reach new levels of majesty, with a fragile buildup snowballing to a crescendo which crashes through the venue walls.
‘Disaster’ is mischievously introduced as “our karaoke song” following some troubling Sheena Easton inspired shenanigans amongst both the band and adoring crowd.
The richly layered subtleties of the track may well have been lost on some of the more inebriated among us but at least it meant ‘Disaster’ managed to live up to its newly realised karaoke moniker.
No such karaoke pretensions were to be evident during the Isn’t Anything MBV orchestral tribute ‘Albatross’, eerie drones blend with vocal interplay between the husband and wife duo as the rest of the band generate that beautiful arpeggiated liquid guitar sound to breathtaking effect.
“There is no Scotch left in Scotland, we have consumed it all” confesses Jace, with strikingly beautiful performances like this, we may just have to forgive and forget, while making do with whisky.
Words: Andy Quigley
