Monday, April 2, 2012

Dinosaur Bones: My Divider

I love a good band name. It helps me gain a handle on how to think about their work. Dinosaur Bones evokes something huge, looming, intimidating... yet fragile and raw. Some great albums are made of a bunch of great songs. Other albums are great because they encompass a whole sound that just works together terrifically. Not all the tracks on "My Divider" are individual gems, and yet from track 1 to track 11 it is an engrossing, wonderful listen.

They play that titanic sound for all it's worth. The opening track, "Making Light" is led by Ben Fox's moaning, vulnerable vocals, toughened by a brick wall of guitar/bass and percussion. The band often sounds more like it's writing scores than rock songs: "Sharks in the Sand," "Life in Trees" and "Point of Pride" are all mesmerizingly moody in their own ways, evoking things like hopelessness and despair without ever seeming like a contrived attempt at gloom. This feels less like a deliberate attempt to drive into the melancholy than something huge an inevitable coming up and swallowing you whole. That the music can go from the extreme to the minimal at a turn helps. Their arrangements are tight, but they follow the flow rather than setting down an a-b-a-c-c pop structure. Their solos burrow deep into the brain and chest.

I say Dinosaur Bones is uninterested in conventional structure. That's not to say the songs sound like meandering jams - they sound like songs. And some of them sound are very much real songs. The petulant, punkish "Royalty," sounds a fair bit like Elvis Costello or Tom Petty (okay, neither of them were punk, but let's take a broad interpretation.) "Hunters" is a particularly dynamic moment, one of the most cinematic tracks in scope, culminating in an explosive rock-out. "Bombs in the Night" is like a panic alarm, with its weirdly offbeat drums, air raid strumming guitars, and metal-detector synth. It has my favourite refrain on the disc ("Cell phones keep going off like bombs in the night." which definitely sounds like a phrase worthy of hooking a song around.) For me, the blockbusters are "NYE" and "Ice Hotels." Both are utterly gorgeous, standout compositions. "Ice Hotels" is shimmering and soft, yet crystal clear, like starlight glinting off arctic snow. Fox's voice is such a desperate whimper here, and the instruments bleed in and out behind him. All through the album, the vocals are as much a means to convey lyrics as they are part of the sonic atmosphere of the band. Fox's singing voice isn't technically studied, but it is beautifully real. He has that sort of "perishing indie rock" voice like Thom Yorke or Julian Casablancas, where there's real expression, in where it's restrained and where it cuts loose.

"NYE" lives and dies on its opening drumbeat. Lucas Fredette sometimes sounds like a drum machine set to "John Bonham" - precise, yet intuitive and uncaged. I don't know anything about how any instruments work, but the stuff he does with hi-hats, I think, is just terrific. The song uses the time-honored prog/arena-rock tactic of marrying a low-key, personal verse with an anthemic chorus. It's wistful and evocative but nonspecific in a great way. And all these songs are presented with a larger-than-life, all-consuming wall of sound that nevertheless is made of only a few discernible parts (guitar/bass, drums, synth, vocal.) Dinosaur Bones: You see all the parts, and they're huge.

Buy this album now: iTunes Canada // iTunes USA // Amazon.ca // Amazon.com


No comments:

Post a Comment