In Montréal's suddenly-hyped music scene, tangible musical links b'tween the Québeçois
post-rockers of yore (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Do Make Say Think, Hangedup) and the way-popular post-rockers/punkers
of the ought-five (The Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade) have been scarce. The closest the Old Zero Kanada has come to conjoining
with the celebrated New Guard of the Great Canadian Rock Renaissance has been in Valley of the Giants, where Broken
Social Scenesters and members of the army of Godspeed! bunkered down in a country house and dangled some of those willowy
guitar-lines out over a dry desert soundtrack — even if that was, in the bigger picture, more a meeting in the
wilderness b'tween Toronto and Montréal. Yet, in all their symphonic tinkling and postmodernist, instrumentalist
klang, Bell Orchestre land smack in b'tween the previously-disparate camps, led by Arcade Fire carrot-top Richard Reed
Napoleon Perry, and featuring his AF homie Sarah Neufeld, and seemingly being largely inspired by the dynamic dynamics
fore'er crescendo'd by the Constellation famile. Making an honest woman out of their moniker, the band do feature bells,
though they're more of the tinkling than the tolling type; and the Orchestre also do plenty of tuned percussion, percussion,
strings, and guitar-strings. Their record runs through a range of instrumentalist archetypes and quietly surprising turns-for-the-worse,
from electrified screech to tape-op minimalism, through pastoralism and soundscapery, to numbers where they knock out all manner of
feigned sturm und drang. It's a fairly fine example of considered/conceited art-school score-writing/settling, but if it
gains any acclaim outside of the regular no-singing ghettos it'll be b'cause of the Certified-Gold! rockband dayjobs Perry and
Neufeld do outside of the Orchestre.
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