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Great Lake Swimmers |
Emerging from Toronto's vibrant indy scene (Broken Social Scene, Royal City, Feist), Great Lake Swimmers started out as the folk alter ego of 28-year-old songwriter Tony Dekker, a one-man band which first drew acclaim in 2003 with its self-titled debut album, likened by French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles to "Harvest covered by Sparklehorse. Or Palace trying to imitate Rust Never Sleeps".
Back now with Bodies And Minds, its sophomore album recorded in St. Theresa's Church, in the Niagara region of Southern Ontario, with Andy Magoffin (The Constantines) behind the boards, Great Lake Swimmers has in the meantime evolved from an alias into a real band, giving body to Dekker's delicate and deeply personal folk musings. From "Song For The Angels" to "Long Into The Evening", the timeless grace of this second opus confirms that Great Lake Swimmers, voted Favourite Folk/Roots Artist at the 2004 Canadian Independent Music Awards, represents one of the most remarkable success stories of indy folk in recent years.
Released in early 2003, the eponymous first Great Lake Swimmers album lifted the veil on the intimate, heartfelt rural folk of Canadian songwriter Tony Dekker. Then aged 27, Dekker had kept his songs to himself for many years before finally deciding to record them. "After constant encouragement from family and friends," he explained at the time, "I eventually decided to take the plunge and go into the studio." Recorded not so much in a studio as in a reverb-laden disused grain silo outside Toronto, the album, haunted by the wide open spaces and the solitude they conjure up, has a high lonesome beauty which brings to mind both the nostalgic balladeering of My Morning Jacket and the wistful country-pop of The Scud Mountain Boys. Quickly picked up by an eulogistic music press, the Great Lake Swimmers' debut was applauded by Uncut as an album with which "Dekker squares the circle between Nick Drake, early Neil Young and Will Oldham", while French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles hailed it as "the best Neil Young album since the last best Neil Young album".
Now, after a series of solo dates across Europe supporting the likes of Jesse Sykes, Idaho, Br. Danielson and Andrew Bird, Dekker is back with Bodies And Minds, a second opus which takes up where the first one left off, that's to say somewhere between the stripped-down poignancy of Bonnie "Prince" Billy and the pastoral elegance of recent Sufjan Stevens. This time round, however, he has a new four-piece band in tow to fill out his warm, plangent folk sound (to top it all, there's even a community choir backing him on "Falling Into The Sky"!) So, with Sandro Perri on lap steel, Erik Arneson on banjo, Almog Ben-David on Wurlitzer and Colin Huebert on drums, Dekker again takes the plunge into a repertoire lulled by melancholy ("Various Stages" deals with manic depression: "I have seen you in various stages of dress / I have seen you through various states of madness") yet uplifted by a kind of spirituality ("Song For The Angels", "I Saw You In The Wild") which seems to echo the pantheism of maverick director Terrence Malick's films. Although Dekker says the album is not so much spiritual as spirited, for the recording the band abandoned the old grain silo in favour of a lakeside church ("a soothing place to record in", says Dekker) in Southern Ontario, in the Niagara region where Dekker grew up, with Andy Magoffin (a string of production credits, including The Constantines and Royal City) at the controls; the album was then mixed at his renowned House of Miracles recording studio. The upshot, with wonders like "When It Flows", "Imaginary Bars" or the gorgeous "I Could Be Nothing", which might be straight out of the classic folk repertoire, is that Great Lake Swimmers confirms its critically-acclaimed first album was no flash in the pan, and its bittersweet, shimmering folk really is one of the best things to come out of Canada in recent memory.
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http://www.greatlakeswimmers.com
