LADYHAWK - Shots

By Simon Howell - The Listening Ear - 03/08/2008

Vancouver band Ladyhawk's self-titled debut was a bit of a revelation. Here, lo and behold, was an honest-to-goodness emotionally driven rock band with a chunky, early-‘90s indie-rock sound, that didn't sound at all contrived. Better yet, they had great songs to back up their chutzpah and passion. Shots finds them, like label mates Okkervil River, continuing to find solace and strength in sounds left behind by their hipper contemporaries.

Opener "I Don't Always Know What You're Saying" proves to be the most immediate thing on the album, with its insistent chug, broken-up title plea in the chorus, and the sense that the band knows just how to push a song's momentum to maximum effect. "Fear" might embarrass the truly hip with its heart-on-sleeve plea of "I just wanna feel something other than fear / I just wanna taste something other than tears," but then this is clearly not a band intended for hype by the noxiously self-conscious blogosphere. "(I'll Be Your) Ashtray," besides featuring the best use of parentheses in a song title so far this year, is reminiscent of the debut's "Advice" with its darkly cynical tone and herky-jerky rhythmic tics.

If there's a substantial difference between Ladyhawk and Shots, it lies in the band's newfound consistency of tone. Where the songs on the debut swerved from nostalgia to lust to righteous indignation like a hormonal teenager on a tear (sometimes literally, as on "Teenage Love Song"), Shots finds them settling into a unified emotional groove, lingering in the desperate emotional spaces many choose to avoid without using that pain as an excuse for empty wallowing. Instead, they seek either to elucidate it, as on "Fear," or to exorcize it, as on two-part, ten-minute closing jam "Ghost Blues" (featuring what might be the most obviously fist-pumping moment yet to reach home stereos this year when speaker-rattling screams cut through the mix around the six-minute mark). While Shots may not provide the surprise jolt its predecessor did, Ladyhawk remain one of Canada's most potent, emotionally engaging bands, even as their scope subtly widens.

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