Great Lake Swimmers
Lost Channels
Nettwerk
By Alexandra Edwards
Scattered amongst the St. Lawrence River, there exists an archipelago known as the 1000 Islands. The islands (numbering 1,793, to be precise) straddle the border between Canada and the U.S. They're dotted with castles and picturesque houses; some sit on chunks of land rising only far enough out of the water to accommodate the structure itself. Images from the area are oddly poetic: foliage and mist obscuring stone chateaus topped by colorful roofs. There is a sense of haunting, of living among mysteries.
Canada's Great Lake Swimmers not only used the imagery of the 1000 Islands as inspiration for their fifth album, Lost Channels — the band's liner notes direct listeners to www.1000islandsphotoart.com — but also recorded parts of the album in those stone castles. The result is an affecting collection of songs, straddling the line between Canadian and American folk sounds.
Vocally, lead singer Tony Dekker exists somewhere at the center of a triangulation of Iron & Wine's Sam Beam, Loney Dear's Emil Svanängen, and that dude from Christian college rock band Jars of Clay. It's a good voice, but it can cause moments of cognitive dissonance. This is not, for example, the kind of voice that should be singing on "The Chorus in the Underground," the band's take a country two-step. That gentle breathy meditation of a voice just really doesn't fit with the banjo-picking and the fiddle-playing.
But Dekker's voice works more often than not. It's especially well-placed on "Stealing Tomorrow," one of the album's more meditative songs. It doesn't draw attention from all the other pieces at work — the quiet pedal steel and bass, the sadly beautiful phrasing.
Direct, guileless lyric similes take the place of any flowery extended metaphors. Most of the time, this songwriting technique works; it's a refreshing difference from other folky singer-songwriter acts. On "Concrete Heart," Dekker sings, "This is the place where I felt like the world's tallest self-supporting tower, at least for a little while anyway," and it makes sense. The words themselves are emotionally affecting, no less so for being straightforward. The approach doesn't always produce these results, though. "Everything is Moving So Fast," for example, turns the title into an insipid, New Age-y chorus ("Everything is moving so fast, I am unlimited").
The strongest tracks utilize a fuller band sound than most folk artists, each element combining to make the songs sound bigger, more expansive. Album opener "Palmistry" is a good example of this, with its organ and drums rounding out the guitars. So is "Pulling a Line," which combines familiar melodies (you'll swear you know the chorus from another song) with some of the band's best imagery ("The line, it writes itself across the dark sky, in the electric flashes ending with a sigh").
There are a few missteps here, but in the end, the effect is a lovely sense of calm. Great Lake Swimmers have given us an album rich in acoustic warmth, for this oddly chilly spring.
Great Lake Swimmers play The EARL with Kate Maki on April 10. Buy tickets here.
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