In their first album of new material in five years, Canada’s reining family of alt-country are back with 10 new songs of moody, sweet, sad, and strongly affecting sketches about growing older.
Such Ferocious Beauty follows the band’s covers album from last year which saw them adding their distinctive lo-fi Americana sound to songs by David Bowie, Graham Parsons, Bob Dylan and surprisingly (and brilliantly) The Cure. Their latest will sound familiar to anyone who’s been following the band at any time over the past four decades.
The album opens with “What I Lost,” a heart wrenching track about dementia, with guitarist and songwriter Michael Timmins and his siblings and bandmates Margo and Peter drawing on their own experiences watching their father struggle with the condition. The album’s focus is on a range of issues around aging and facing death. “This is a different kind of recording; there’s a denseness to it,” said Michael. “In many ways the music, the choice of certain structures, the tones used become as important in communicating the albums themes as do the lyrics.”
The music throughout is dark and atmospheric and at times the band’s most experimental. “Flood,” the song which lends a lyric to the album title, begins with electric guitar feedback on a loop before Margo starts singing. While elsewhere, on a song like “Hard to Build. Easy to Break,” a track about appreciating what you have, while not exactly a sunny song lyrically, musically the band gets into a catchy groove that sustains the track until the end. “Shadows 2,” inspired by the DH Lawrence poem Shadows, again focuses on their dad’s worsening condition and contemplating death, but you can’t help but hear the beauty in the despair here. The record ends with “Blue Skies,” an acoustic lament that reminds you just how deft this band is at putting words to complex emotions we all eventually experience.
Along with bassist Alan Anton, the band’s lineup has not changed at all since their 1986 debut and, thankfully, though they’ve grown as musicians and songwriters over the decades, the core of the band’s sound is the same as it ever was.
