The Besnard Lakes
A Coliseum Complex Museum
JAGJAGUWAR
6/10
For their annual summer holiday, Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas travel to a campsite on Besnard Lake, in rural Saskatchewan, some 2,000 miles from their home in Montreal. That’s where the husband and wife have been conjuring up the inspiration for four albums over the past fifteen years as The Besnard Lakes. Album five appears to be no different. Like their previous efforts, A Coliseum Complex Museum is imbued with a heady sense of psychedelia—“Golden Lion” and “Nightingale” are sumptuous slices of shimmering, glacial rock that are overblown and understated all at once that nevertheless manage to avoid the trappings of pretension. While these eight tracks are, on the whole, soothing and ethereal, there’s a glowering, brooding heaviness to the final song—“Tungsten 4: The Refugee”—that, once heard, seems sadly absent in the rest of the record. Regardless, this is a record worth getting lost in—much like the landscape that once again inspired it.
