In an era when the smoldering remnants of the music industry are busy flooding the market with nostalgia-driven commemorative reissues, genuine comebacks, in which a veteran act delivers new material that meets or even surpasses its former standards, are a much rarer thing. One of the best examples in 2019 arrived from north of the border as late-\u201980s Canadian darlings The Northern Pikes\u2014owners of gold and platinum albums and half a dozen hit singles, but only sporadically active since 1992\u2014reconvened with three-quarters of their classic-era lineup to deliver the vigorous, emphatic return to form Forest Of Love<\/i>. <\/p>\n
The new album finds founding members Jay Semko (bass, vocals), Bryan Potvin (guitar, vocals) and Don Schmid (drums)\u2014who\u2019ve toured occasionally in the 2000s as a power trio\u2014joined by Grapes Of Wrath\u2019s Kevin Kane on guitar, keyboards, and vocals. The album is the band\u2019s ninth overall, but first in 16 years. As before the emphasis is on clever, hooky songs that are unafraid to veer off on exploratory tangents without ever losing the central thread, guitar rock with as much brain as brawn.<\/p>\n
Kickoff cut \u201cKing In His Castle\u201d plays with anti-authority tropes, a feisty number that alternates ringing, airy verses with a thundering chorus of Zeppelinesque crunch, setting the bar high for what\u2019s to come. That promise is promptly fulfilled with \u201cCanada Boy,\u201d a driving, exuberant rocker overflowing with tight harmonies and propulsive guitar and drum fills. \u201cJulianna\u201d offers a change of pace, a spacious mid-tempo number with a soaring chorus, leading into the self-reflective acoustic ballad \u201cElephant Who Lives Here.\u201d<\/p>\n
And then we\u2019re back at it. \u201cWill Over Will\u201d is all taut, thrumming, electric tension for its first 2:20, where upon the tension releases with a time-signature-shifting, sky-punching bridge that eventually resolves back to the original melody. \u201cDraw From The Deck\u201d plays a ringing guitar line and soaring harmonies off against a subversive psychedelic undercurrent. <\/p>\n
The title track arrives as a low, rumbly celebration of passion that\u2019s both earthy and full of drive, followed a pair of playful, perceptive British Invasion-styled rockers in \u201cFaith Of A Fool\u201d and \u201cMr. Unhappy.\u201d The album closes on a gentle, elegiac note as Semko and Potvin harmonize over twin acoustics, pleading with a disaffected lover: \u201cDon\u2019t you give up \/ Don\u2019t you give up \/ Keep your faith in love.\u201d <\/p>\n
Forest Of Love<\/i> spotlights a middle-aged band that\u2019s lost none of its essential fire, while gaining hard-won wisdom along the way, writing songs that are sharply self-reflective yet also dynamic and vital. This album feels not so much like a restatement as a rebirth, a fresh flowering of the Northern Pikes that engages head and heart in equal measures, and urges every one of us not to give up when we still have more to offer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":33940,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[10451],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-45768","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-the-northern-pikes","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=45768"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=45768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}