A Coliseum Complex Museum

It's understated, yet incredibly ominous. This album should convince you that solitude can inspire great musical work.

A Coliseum Complex Museum is further proof that the Besnard Lakes are a band with big ideas and real vision, and just as importantly, they have the talent and focus to makes those ideas into something worth hearing.

Mystical and psychedelic, with a real knack for texture and detail in the midst of a big, blown-out prog adventure, this is an album best served whole.

This band stirs a noisy pot of rock sounds, but vapors that escape smell delicious.

Like a lot of shoegaze, a uniform production and lots of layers mean the tracks have a tendency to lack distinction from one another. But this happens surprisingly rarely.

The blend of psychedelic, stoner riffs and driving percussion on tracks like 'Towers Sent Her to Sheets of Sound' sits comfortably alongside the quiet waltz of 'Necronomicon' and exhibits just how exciting, thrilling and moving rock can be.

A Coliseum Complex Museum, the Lakes' fifth full-length (and fourth for Jagjaguwar) manages to keep up with that sterling record of consistency: It's a beautiful and often rousing album of deep, proggy shoegaze.

A Coliseum Complex Museum, despite sporting yet another bonkers title, is a top effort that bolsters their burgeoning reputation, even if it doesn’t quite reach the highs of their very best.

A Coliseum Complex Museum is a somewhat predictable, though no less impeccably arranged, journey that exhibits the Besnard Lakes’ commitment to disciplined psychedelia.

They have at times found themselves mired in over-fussy arrangements, but here recapture something of the crisp economy of their breakout 2007 LP ...Are The Dark Horse. [Feb 2016, p.73]

Coliseum stacks everything in the right place, and it’s all executed with the usual precision, so why doesn’t the album dazzle quite like the last few? Like the four albums before it, the Besnards self-recorded and self-produced this one at Breakglass, and more than its predecessors, it begs for an outside collaborator, somebody to shake up the band’s routine and perhaps lend some new tricks to their shrinking playbook.

As has been noted about some of their previous work, the sonic characteristics, though very seductive, can become slightly repetitive and it could be argued this does not serve the base material to best advantage--there are interesting ideas floating around and it might be worth allowing some of them a little more clarity.

Though unlikely to win legions of new fans, this is another impeccably crafted psychedelic rock record sure to please fans of the genre.

Their music is a similarly odd hybrid [as the Bray Road Beast that their first track references], its great dreamy prog head gazing down at its shoes. [Feb 2016, p.108]

As was the case on 2013's Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO, seem poised equidistant between the mellifluousness of '70s Beach Boys and prog rock opacity. [Feb 2016, p.93]