The Dears’ Lovers Rock ends on a triumphant note with call for change
The best ’80s band to emerge out of the 21st century, any Dears release is a call for celebration, then contemplation.
Between 2005’s No Cities Left and 2017’s Times Infinity Volume Two — with the blindingly gemfilled Disintegration Street which I still spin every three weeks — the Dears long ago shook off the shackles of the Smiths to create one of the most underrated and super-feely, guitar-rock catalogues in Canuck history.
In turn, the Montreal band confronted racism in ways that summon tears, shot through time and space in repeated metrics of “billions,” and frequently cracked open the sarcophagus of love, unleashing both the lady and the tiger at once in an almost trademark fusion of fear and excitement.
The just-released Lovers Rock lives in a slightly smaller territory than all that hype.
My main, I don’t want to say “complaint,” but more of a circumstantial taste thing is that there’s a disconnected dreaminess to the album (others have oddly complained it’s too maudlin) that’s taking its time to seed ... like the slow-motion stagger of its penultimate number, No More Wrongs.
The first tune, Heart of an Animal, is good, slightly menacing like a teenage werewolf, and Murray Lightburn deploys his usual powers: cinematic tone shifts, stratospheric wails, pounding drums near a foreshadowed crescendo.
The effort tightens on the next, emotionally complicated I Know What You’re Thinking and It’s Awful, where “I can’t forget it” becomes the first earworm of an album that can’t boast half as many as, say, 2008’s devastating Missiles.
Things next, almost hilariously, go into a U.K. synth-pop, Blur mode as Natalia Yanchuk lays down her cynical condemnations between Weezer whoo-ooohs on Instant Nightmare! where she declares, “But no one gives a damn” and “We know it’s all a scam.” More on this as we move on.
It’s almost like channel flipping Ween songs in a way as Lightburn rides his reverb guitar into that earlier-mentioned dreaminess in Is This What You Really Want?, where he sounds a lot like Edmonton singer-songwriter Ben Sures.
You can almost hear the band going, “this song needs to be more interesting” as the tone shifts in the middle of Stille
Lost, with dark and rumbling pianos coming in. Then, on No Place on Earth, we find that menacing cabaret vampire in Lightburn as he declares, “We’re lost; nobody gives a damn.” Oh, the defeat!
With the rising feeling of anger and revolution brewing the last few years — currently exploding on American streets — it’s hard to see this as anything but an exhale of fatigue. Either way, once the saxophones and his la-la-lahs kick in, it’s probably the most electrified moment on the album.
But then the cruise-lounge Too Many Wrongs takes us into port with We’ll Go Into Hiding. The finale stands up as Lovers Rock’s best song, summoning both a place and an idea, as Lightburn goes through an amazing internal, last-minute-bravery dialogue over rising piano, ending with the spirit of Marvin Gaye and Bob Marley.
I’ll drop his words, and scram myself.
“Remember when we were younger. We never got on our knees. We stood up for things that mattered. And took it to the streets. I don’t want to hear excuses. We’re leaving this place tonight. We’re building a better future. It’s gonna be all right. It’s gonna be all right.”