Jagjaguwar
2006
Beast Moans
About This Album
Canada has certainly been the hot spot for indie bands in the new millennium, so the fact that the singers from three of the biggest (Dan Bejar from Destroyer, Spencer Krug from Wolf Parade, and Carey Mercer from Frog Eyes) came together in Swan Lake has been -- while perhaps not much of a surprise (the idea of a "collective" being quite a popular idea up north, coupled with the fact that the three have been working together in some form or another for the past few years) -- enough to thoroughly excite the hipsters, who, anxiously awaiting its release, were forced to sustain themselves on the two songs, "All Fires" and "City Calls," from on the group's MySpace site. Fortunately, Beast Moans should thoroughly satisfy these malnourished fans. As a group, Swan Lake writes songs that have more cacophony and less form than what any of the three writers produced individually: they have structure, but it's a structure based on how the layers define it instead of how the structure defines the layers. In "A Venue Called Rubella," for example, keys and guitars play their own rhythms with little regard for what the others are doing while the singers' indie-English-accented voices spout vaguely postmodern and often undecipherable lyrics.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,7 and 12)

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