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The Lake Vernon Drowning
The Lake Vernon Drowning My favourite kind of weather is chilly, stark, possibly pissing rain, though fog and /or drizzle will do just as well. It makes me forget how hum-drum and boring pieces of my life sometimes are, and puts me in just the right state of melancholy reminiscence. And so that may explain why The Lake Vernon Drowning (available online at www.cdbaby.com), the concept album by Toronto musician Andrew Barker, resonated so much for me. It's like a long lonely walk on a grey fall day. Before sitting down to write this, I listened to LVD a handful of times, sometimes hearing hints of Flaming Lips or The Rheostatics, but always amazed by the unmistakeably unique musical voice and the raw vulnerability of the writing. It is otherworldly, like the soundtrack to an indie stop-motion movie by a young Tim Burton or the NFB… real art music, while resisting the avant-garde and remaining absorbing and accessible. Built around a formative event in Barker's youth, the music is a collection of mournful lullabies: cathartic, haunted, and deeply emotional; a surreal dreamscape of retrieved memories. Like an aural figure skater, Barker is a master of making the complex sound simple. With an archetypically Canadian singer-songwriter aesthetic, he uses a seamless blend of hi-fi and acoustic sounds to weave textures of sometimes overwhelming beauty. The music is full of space but not quite sparse, Barker's use of unaffected acoustic guitar backed by simple bass lines and drum sequences, with a variety of blips and samples, and at its peak, on "Exit No More," a soulful kickass electric blues guitar solo. This is the kind of music that needs to be made, but that normally won't garner nearly enough attention – too counter-cultural and anti-mainstream, thumbing its nose @ the status quo – to make it worth an artist's while. And while the tides have begun to turn in favour of indie artists, in the shadow of the current homogenized mainstream market, The Lake Vernon Drowning is still a brave expedition into possibility, an oeuvre that challenges the limits of music as art. ~ Ben Bowen, 02/2006
