Album Review: The Besnard Lakes - Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO

Montreal four-piece The Besnard Lakes have straddled the line between grandiosity and excess since their inception. 2010's …Are The Roaring Night managed to get the formula just right, balancing their sonic extravagances with nuance and subtlety, and their subsequent live shows were mesmeric. Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO is their fourth album, but despite the title (surely in the running for worst album title of 2013) the eight tracks on offer mesh together to create a slow-burn album that's as immersive as it is indulgent.

Opening with the sonorous 46 Satires, with Olga Goreas' ethereal vocals wafting in and out of the slipstream of gossamer guitar lines swelling to a euphoric splendour, it seems like business as usual. And it is in parts – tracks like At Midnight and Colour Yr Lights In, with frontman Jace Lasek on vocal duties and the guitars chugging along in the Besnard Lakes-patented psych swirl, could fit snugly with any of their past oeuvre. But there are flourishes, such as strings, innovative guest musicians (including the wonderful Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade and Moonface) and The Specter, a track that wouldn't be out of place on a Bee Gees album – that is, until the wall of sound guitars build to a crescendo.

The album is flamboyant and verbose, cryptic and at times distant, but it is wholly a Besnard Lakes album (the flaming horse artwork and iconic paintings that have graced previous covers re-emerge here). Lasek and co. clearly are on a mission to create an interwoven catalogue of tremulous dreamscapes, filled with magic realism, psychedelic euphoria and ephemeral musings, and Until In Excess… meets these expectations.