★★★★★
If we search Great Lake Swimmers on Youtube, click the top result and scroll down to the highest rated comment, we find user 'itoastyourpants' making the pithy remark 'Thank god for Indie Folk <3'. Which is odd, because I'd always assumed that Indie Folk was musically equivalent to a big bag of sweaty bollocks. Folk's heritage jetissoned, cunning exenterated, subtlety sandblasted...
- drownedinsound.com
2012-05-28
★★★★★
Nettwerk First impressions aren't everything, but they do set the tone. The opening notes of Great Lake Swimmers' 2009 release Lost Channels boasted gorgeously crisp, shimmering guitar--and they led to a Polaris Prize-short-listed album. The Canadian crew's fifth album, New Wild Everywhere, doesn't fare so well; opener "Think That You Might Be Wrong" enters with a slow, echoing guitar pluck, leading to an album heavy on plodding, moody folk and light on the uplifting glow of Channels...
- www.relix.com
2012-04-30
★★★★★
On their fifth album New Wild Everywhere, seasoned Canadian band Great Lake Swimmers continue to hone their indie-folk sound while exploring an epic grandeur that permeates both the musical landscape and lyrical imagery. Their contemplative melodies are accentuated by breathy vocals from frontman Tony Dekker, but the overall tone of New Wild Everywhere is that of richness in a decidedly slower pace...
- www.glidemagazine.com
2012-04-16
★★★★★
It's not often that a genre like country is directly compatible with the nebulous, know-it-when-you-hear-it concept of indie. It's not often when country isn't immediately brushed off with the rolling of eyes and gnashing of teeth, either. Far safer to use the (now) near-meaningless descriptor folk if acoustic instruments are primarily involved and the influence of synthesizers is largely absent. But it's easy to understand why haters hate...
- www.prefixmag.com
2012-04-16
★★★★★
Great Lake Swimmers has always been a band - or a vehicle for frontman Tony Dekkar's songs - about atmosphere. The eponymous debut record from 2003 was recorded in an abandoned silo. Bodies and Minds, the follow-up, was recorded in a church, while the third record, Ongiara, was made in Aeolian Hall, a famous music venue in Ontario. Lost Channels, the band's 2009 record, was culled from sessions in various locations, drawing different vibes from each...
- www.popmatters.com
2012-04-12
★★★★★
I was going to start this review with a clever and witty rundown of other great bands that have "lake" in their names, Midlake, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, etc. There is also apparently a band just named "Lake," which I would have had to listen a little to if I were going to write that review. But I'm not, because this album is too good to dally over, because it's so good, jaw droppingly good, not a false note in the bunch kind of good...
- www.adequacy.net
2012-04-09
★★★★★
Like Cowboy Junkies and Iron & Wine, Great Lake Swimmers made such a strong impression with their atmospheric, minimalist early songs that it's been easy to underestimate how good the band became once it started filling out their sound. In the mid-'00s, Tony Dekker's band of Canadian folkies caught fans of soft indie music by surprise with the song "Moving Pictures, Silent Films," a soft, echoing ballad that hung wispily, like mist over a mountain brook...
- www.avclub.com
2012-04-05
★★★★★
Since their formation in 2003, Toronto-based folk-rockers Great Lake Swimmers have made four full-length albums, none of which were recorded in an actual studio (opting instead for abandoned grain silos, churches, historic music venues and renovated castles). For their fifth LP, the band finally broke tradition. The result is an album that is altogether pleasant, but just doesn't do enough to distinguish itself on the map from the rest in its genre. Location, location, location.
- filtermagazine.com
2012-04-05
★★★★★
The Ontario-born singer-songwriter Tony Dekker has always relied on natural forms as the foundations for the metaphors, conceits, and imagery he uses in the songs of Great Lake Swimmers. His lyrics evoke a mountain range as a lover's spine and a river's edge as a place of spiritual reckoning, subtly chronicling the epic geological changes that mirror immense human emotions. Mountains shift, rivers cut canyons, hearts yearn and break. That idea of transience and flux extends to the band itself...
- pitchfork.com
2012-04-05
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