Given Said the Whale's success on rock radio in the last few years, it's easy to forget that the Vancouver band's early music was pretty damn strange.
This was most apparent on the group's first ever release, 2007's home-recorded Let's Have Sound EP. Over half of its 10 tracks clocked in at under two minutes, with "Better for You" centred around lo-fi cello effects and "To Spite the Long Winter" consisting of a collage of atmospheric folk, sampled radio chatter, and creepy playground chants: "I am slowly going crazy / 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, switch / Crazy going slowly am I / 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, switch."
That old weirdness raises its head on the band's latest effort, the all-lowercase and intentionally misspelled hawaiii. Co-frontman Tyler Bancroft lent a hand in self-producing the record (along with long-time studio collaborator Tom Dobrzanski), and his input harkens back to the anything-goes spirit of the group's formative works.
This time around, however, the five musicians have managed to hone those art-y inclinations, making a record that's simultaneously more adventurous and more pop-friendly than anything they've done previously. Take a song like "On the Ropes," a harmony-filled bubblegum folk ditty that adds a splash of distortion to singer Ben Worcester's voice and juxtaposes his acoustic guitar with bassist Nathan Shaw's fuzzy low-end blasts.
"I Could Smoke" is similarly inventive, as Bancroft muses about the possible virtues of nicotine sticks while the fast-moving arrangement moves from minimal electric strumming to beat-driven electronics to drummer Spencer Schoening's surging rock rhythms. Elsewhere, "Willow" unexpectedly shifts from spiky guitar stabs to a sunshine-streaked pop waltz ripped straight from the Beach Boys playbook, and the paranoid "Resolutions" is an atmospheric dirge that concludes with an out-of-nowhere verse from crossover rap star Shad.
Even the album's most pop-friendly tracks have an undercurrent of quirkiness. "I Love You" -- which recently topped the Canadian Alternative Rock chart -- is a crunchy post-punk banger that will have fans jumping on tables and doing the twist during its shamelessly simple three-chord bridge, while "Mother" gives keyboardist Jaycelyn Brown a chance to show off her synth skills. It’s the closest the outfit has come to writing a full-blown dance song.
None of this is too bizarre, and you definitely won't be finding hawaiii in the experimental section of your local record store, but it's enough to indicate that Said the Whale has found a way to expand its sound by magnifying all of its best attributes. It’s also enough to suggest that Bancroft and company are capable of venturing into new, even bolder directions in the future. I fucking dare them to put out a drone record.
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