“Omega Dog”
from the album Degeneration Street
2011
iTunes
How appropriate that a key line in “Omega Dog,” the sinister-sounding opening track on the new Dears album, Degeneration Street, contains an enigmatic phrase ( “Pressed down, shaking together”) that is revealed by the CD’s booklet to be inspired by the Bible. It’s from the Gospel of Luke, to be specific.
The fifth full-length album by one of Montreal’s finest is full of such unsettling, inscrutable flashes that foreshadow Big Ideas, both lyrical and musical. This is a work that offers glimpses of hope in the face of despair and strummed whispers that resolve themselves as crescendos of wailing guitars and walls of voices.
The aforementioned “Omega Dog,” for example, builds from Radiohead-style clean-chord anxiety to claustrophobic white-noise wailing, a la “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).”
Indeed, for all its stadium-size ambitions and pulsating, keyboard-driven beats, the disc has moments of pop friendliness that owe as much to Abbey Road as to OK Computer. “Yesteryear,” the album’s most shameless flirtation with catchiness, has both a melodic, McCartneyesque bass line, courtesy of Roberto Arquilla, and a wonderful section with Fab Four oohs. A jaunty solo by Patrick Krief in “5 Chords” shows a trace of Badfinger, while “Easy Suffering” sounds driven by a folk-rock jangle — but with an industrial-size anthemic chorus breathing down its neck.
Mostly, Degeneration Street has places to get lost in. Repeated listenings continue to reveal new layers, but the immediate, epic quality of the songs — a make-or-break factor for Dears devotees — isn’t compromised. In other words, you won’t have to look too hard to find your share of Diamond Dogs-era David Bowie (“Tiny Man”) and U2 (“Thrones”).
Frontman and principal writer Murray Lightburn turns in a tour-de-force vocal performance throughout, notably on the title track, a dirge that shifts from its melancholy minor key to sunny major chords on the chorus. It’s as uplifting a musical metaphor as you’ll find anywhere for a band that usually finds a bit of light in the darkness.