Great Lake Swimmers
Lost Channels
Nettwerk
By Mike Randall
The river has long been a symbolic mainstay of popular music. Weaved through varying fabrics of life, it has been used by countless instrument-toting troubadours, from Bruce Springsteen to Billy Joel, to represent a plethora of human conditions. On their fourth album, the fact Toronto’s Great Lake Swimmers explore themes of water should come as little surprise. Their entire existence revolves around crafting works steeped in tradition, whether it’s derivative of common subject matter or organic instrumentation devoid of overt complexity.
Tony Dekker writes songs the way they were originally intended: borrowing from the land and its tools to not only explain tales of personal experience, but to create sounds as natural as a breeze. Here, Dekker uses a river frequently, signifying fear, hope, salvation, solitude, openness and movement. His delivery is full of sincerity, like a more stable Nick Drake with melancholy still in tact, and it’s as if you’re sitting on the banks alongside of him, comforting him through whatever it is he’s confronting.
There are some bigger sounding tracks on Lost Channels when compared to previous output, but in terms of Great Lake Swimmers, that doesn’t mean grandiose. It’s clear Dekker was going for a more full band exhibit this time out, which is evident out of the gate with the up-tempo “Palmistry.” Backed by mandolin, organ and Rickenbacker guitar, Dekker combines a Byrds sound with work-song lyrics like, “You can see by the lines on my hands I’ve been carrying a heavy load.” The collective effort, however, is most spot-on during the record’s hook-filled lead single, “Pulling On A Line,” which owns a quintessential Americana texture that is pure roots-rock perfection.
Like many Canadian acts before them, Great Lake Swimmers have an ability to channel nostalgic American music as good, if not better than our own countrymen. The front-porch bluegrass of “The Chorus In The Underground” sounds like it was born in Appalachia, complete with banjo, violin and gorgeous multi-harmony vocals. “Still” is Dekker’s answer to Wilco’s “What Light,” while the haunting minor key of “New Light” captures the melancholic stillness of another day. When Dekker sings “The sound of your breathing, the silence intense, the hearts are pounding endlessly here,” you tangibly hear what he’s describing. Still, it almost always comes back to the river, as it does during the gentle folk of the album closing “Unison Falling Into Harmony,” when Dekker laments, “So save up your tears for the next time it rains, and flow across the floor like the unstoppable river.”
As nice as it is to hear Dekker and company branch out, his bread and better has always been through the pastoral. “Everything Is Moving So Fast” is an ironic title for a tune that crawls slowly like a calm stream, but it’s the reflective nature of a song like “Concrete Harmony” that’s most effective. Using just voice, slow finger-picked guitar and subtle violin accents, Dekker returns to the site of a memory with one of the record’s great lines: “This is where I felt like the world’s tallest self-supporting tower.” It’s as if the more lost Dekker feels, the better lyrics he’s able to come up with to find his sense of place. Another example is how he channels Sun Kil Moon with the guitar, pedal steel and bass of “Stealing Tomorrow,” revealing, “And it’s like someone else is driving/Like this body isn’t mine.”
For Tony Dekker, his fascination with rivers seems to be explained during the album’s most goose-bump inducing track, “River’s Edge.” To the tune of a Decemberists’-style funeral march, Dekker is in isolation, accompanying himself on guitar and piano, sounding like he’s freeing something from deep inside. He sings of a place he can go to get away from it all, to yearn for something better, to find himself. Fortunately for us, we only have to turn to him to find those things.
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