del bel

Your ultimate 2011 CanCon playlist! Here are a bunch of songs that got a lot of airtime ’round Reasons HQ this year, in no particular order. If you’d like to hear and/or purchase them for yourself, we’ve got most of them up for perusal on an iTunes playlist at www.bit.ly/bestben.

1. Austra, “Lose It.” Aching, end-of-the-world sentiment and spine-tingling mezzo soprano vocals from Toronto’s opera-schooled Katie Stelmanis, the most enchanting voice to break out of anywhere in 2011.

2. Deadmau5, “Sofi Needs a Ladder.” I was a bit of a Deadmau5 doubter before, but this grindingly sexy dance-floor banger with Sofia Toufa on the mike slays me every time I hear it.

3. Jenn Grant, “Getcha Good.” A joyous, rollicking pop ditty from Halifax sad-girl-gone-happy Grant’s unexpectedly rockin’ Honeymoon Punch album.

4. Dog Day, “Scratches.” Reasons to Live’s favourite band loses two members, comes back harder and punker than ever on the lead single from this year’s rough-and-tumble Deformer.

5. Jon McKiel, “Motion Pictures.” Yet another Haligonian, McKiel has been in one dark-ass mood of late, but this succinct, uptempo cut from the otherwise mirthless Confidence Lodge EP has a real sparkle to it — albeit a bittersweet one.

6. Whitehorse, “Broken.” Cute-as-a-button CanCon couple Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland play warring lovers divvying up their record collection on this smashing remake of Doucet’s 2005 solo breakup gem, “Broken One.”

7. The Luyas, “Cold Canada.” Glistens like Montreal in a nighttime snowfall and, fittingly, gives me chills every time I hear it. “We’re gonna lose,” warns Jessie Stein. “Snow will always win.”

8. Young Galaxy, “B.S.E.” If radio made any sense, this ’80s-indebted electro-pop delight would be all over it and already a huge hit. There’s still time to make it so.

9. The Mark Inside, “Can’t Take Her With You (When It’s Over).” Wherein the resurgent Toronto quartet chases away all the disappointments of Beady Eye and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds in three glorious minutes.

10. Del Bel, “Beltone.” Dark and mildly demented late-night twang from one of the most exciting Toronto bands to emerge in 2011. Lisa Conway gets her P.J. Harvey on whilst channelling every damaged nightclub singer ever to appear in a David Lynch film.

11. Hooded Fang, “ESP.” Somewhere between last year’s Album and this year’s scrumptious Tosta Mista, Toronto’s Hooded Fang toned down the “twee” and turned the Them!-like R&B rumble up to 11. We like very much.

12. Bad Vibrations, “My Way.” Ex-Dog Day drummer K.C. Spidle does a Dave Grohl and steps to the front in his own band. Bad Vibes’ brooding noise-rock is of a piece with DD’s, but gilded with a pleasing amount of embittered, stoner-friendly heaviness.

13. The Weeknd, “The Zone.” “I can’t feel a damn thing/ But I’ma touch you right.” Elastic-voiced Toronto R&B upstart Abel Tesfaye does his emotionally adrift thing as well as he’s ever done, then pal Drake utterly nails it with a dead-eyed cameo on the outro.

14. The Pack A.D., “Sirens.” Grimy three-chord nastiness from Canada’s most dangerous guitar-and-drums duo. Gets in your head like some kind of brain maggot.

15. Lights, “Toes.” Hangin’ out with electro-rockers Holy F--- has obviously had an impact on formerly demure Toronto singer/songwriter Lights. This is a proper, thwacking dance tune.

16. The Darcys, “Shaking Down the Old Bones.” Smoky, low-slung groove-rock from one of Toronto’s best kept secrets. Dig the harmonies.

17. Rituals, “Endless Mess.” Buzzing lo-fi Goth-rock from Vancouver. Bleak and noisy, just the way it should always be.

18. Drake, “Headlines.” Poor Drake. Always so sad, even when he’s bragging.

19. Marine Dreams, “New Decade.” Who’d have thought there was still this much life left in the riff from “Sweet Jane”?

20. Handsome Furs, “What About Us.” Dan Boeckner and Alexei Perry tone down the guitars, turn up the synths and reinvent themselves as a coed Depeche Mode with typical flair.

This list appears, shy the odd track owing to rights issues, on Rdio at bit.ly/rdioben. - The Toronto Star

I have a list of 25 excellent records from 2011 here that I cannot bring myself to whittle down any further.

It could easily be much longer. I just have to call it somewhere or we’ll be here until next December. It was just that kind of year — new objects of compulsive listening have come fast and furious, one on top of the other, without pause for the past 12 months.

It’s worth pointing out that a lot of everyone’s favourites came from Toronto this year: Drake’s Take Care, F---ed Up’s David Comes to Life, the Weeknd’s House of Balloons and Austra’s Feel It Break — which sits at the top of this list for the simple reason that it was the album I listened to the most in 2011 — figure in a number of prominent international publications’ year-end roundups at the moment.

This city has arguably more happening from a musical standpoint than ever and there are a whole lot of artists in this town who deserve our applause. Give it up for ’em, won’t you?

Now, here’s some music that makes me really, really happy. Hope some of it makes you happy, too.

1. Austra, Feel It Break. Many local observers have assumed for a few years now that Katie Stelmanis was going to do something great with that massive voice of hers. I’m not sure anyone expected it to be this great, though. The debut record from Austra, the moody synth-pop trio that shares Stelmanis’s middle name, is one long, Gothic frisson from start to finish, the chilly perfection of its pulsing electronic nightscapes exceeded only by the operatic grandeur of the vocals. An outright stunner and maybe the best thing Paper Bag Records has ever released.

2. P.J. Harvey, Let England Shake. For her eighth album proper, the most consistently compelling female performer of the past 20 years reinvented herself once again, this time as an ethereal species of protest-folk singer. The result was a rivetingly original treatise on nationhood and the folly of war vividly draped in the muck and blood of the battlefield and the finest album Polly Jean Harvey has made in a decade.

3. High Places, Original Colors. Rob Barber and Mary Pearson all but abandon the cluttered ethno-electronica of their early recordings for a surprisingly direct and booming turn on the dance floor. Changing shapes and getting better all the time.

4. Wild Flag, Wild Flag. Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss of the late, great Sleater-Kinney join forces with Helium’s Mary Timony and ex-Minder Rebecca Cole for an indie-rock “supergroup” that really is super. So much fun.

5. Dog Day, Deformer. Losing half their band last year didn’t faze Seth Smith and Nancy Urich. They moved to the coast outside Halifax and went to work reconfiguring Dog Day as the raw, unkempt and deliciously misanthropic punk-rock duo that gets tuneful revenge on the world on Deformer.

6. The Luyas, Too Beautiful to Work. Too beautifully weird to ever be more than a cult proposition, sadly, Jessie Stein and Co. really hit their art-pop stride on their sophomore album. Much singsong loveliness lurks amidst the bracing noise and tricked-out polyrhythms.

7. The Weeknd, House of Balloons/Thursday/Echoes of Silence. Youthful Toronto future-R&B upstart Abel Tesfaye released three internationally acclaimed mini-masterpieces of self-loathing in 2011 — free, without a record label and without doing a shred of press, no less. A star really is born.

8. F---ed Up, David Comes to Life. Yes, it’s exhausting to get through. But let’s not forget that a rock opera by a hardcore band has no business existing in the first place, let alone being this tuneful and accomplished.

9. Cold Cave, Cherish the Light Years. Like every awesome Goth album that came out in the 1980s, all playing at once.

10. Del Bel, Oneiric. Cinematic spookiness from another highly promising new Toronto act led by composer Tyler Belluz. Singer Lisa Conway is a pretty major discovery, methinks.

11. Mastodon, The Hunter. Shorter songs and the absence of an overarching concept don’t make The Hunter any less brain-bubblingly complex than the rest of the Mastodon catalogue. The new kings of thinking man’s metal.

12. The War on Drugs, Slave Ambient. Tom Petty’s Jeff Lynne years as heard through a thick fog of shoegazer ambience and really, really good weed.

13. Thee Oh Sees, Carrion Crawler/The Dream. Manic garage-punk battery with a large side order of sleaze. Deliriously entertaining.

14. The Roots, Undun. Bizarrely accessible, considering it’s a hip-hop concept album about a doomed hustler inspired by a Sufjan Stevens song. One of the Roots’ best.

15. Young Widows, In and Out of Youth and Lightness. About as dark and heavy and mirthless and scary as breakup records get.

16. The Pack A.D., Unpersons. Becky Black and Maya Miller set out to make “a really loud, fun punk-rock record.” Mission accomplished.

17. Cut Off Your Hands, Hollow. Insanely sweet and catchy New Wave jangle-pop from New Zealand. Why isn’t this band huge?

18. Drake, Take Care. Far more thoughtful, subdued and musically challenging than your average hip-hop record. This kid’s the real deal.

19. Jon McKiel, Confidence Lodge/Tonka War Cloud. An EP and an album’s worth of dark-shaded songs about murder, mortality, loss and other fun topics from a most intriguing young Halifax singer/songwriter.

20. Young Galaxy, Shapeshifting. Just when we thought we were getting to know Young Galaxy, the Montreal dream-pop outfit handed its third album over to Swedish producer Dan Lissvik of Studio and let him give it a formidable dose of electroshock therapy. Warm, invitingly rhythmic and entirely unexpected.

21. Smith Westerns, Dye It Blonde. A pack of kids barely old enough to drink legally yet who play like shaggy-haired 50-something stoners who complain that rock music stopped being relevant in the 1970s.

22. The Darcys, The Darcys. Talented Toronto underdogs finally have a smashing sophomore record to show for a couple years’ worth of uncommon adversity.

23. Zomby, Dedication. Mysterious U.K. electronic producer curates a peculiarly cohesive collection of all-over-the-place micro-instrumentals inspired by his father’s passing.

24. The Mark Inside, Nothing to Admit. I’ve said it before, but it’s true: Nothing to Admit is exactly the record you wish all those disappointing, overhyped Brit-pop guitar bands would make. And it’s from Toronto.

25. Hooded Fang, Tosta Mista. Perpetually peppy local lads and ladies turn up the fuzz outta nowhere for a non-stop, chugging go-go-pop dance party. Suddenly we have no idea what the next Fang record will sound like. And that’s just fine. - The Toronto Star

Del Bel, Oneiric. Speaking of the best Canadian albums of the year, the just-released debut album by Toronto collective Del Bel will undoubtedly be haunting a lot of homes and headphones well into 2012.

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyler Belluz cobbled these shadowy, twanging cabaret-pop tunes together with a long list of collaborators plucked from the ranks of Ohbijou, Do Make Say Think, Entire Cities, Sunparlour Players and a bunch of other bands you’ll recognize, yet there’s nothing remotely piecemeal about Oneiric. With gifted vocalist Lisa Conway — a dead ringer for Anna Calvi (or P.J. Harvey) on the death-blues dirge “Beltone” but generally sounds like a nightclub jazz singer — pulling a bona fide star turn on the mic, Belluz’s evocative instrumentals trace an elegant descent into the abyss. - The Toronto Star

DISC REVIEW
Del Bel - Oneiric
(Out of Sound) BY BENJAMIN BOLES
Del Bel are yet another sprawling Toronto band featuring members of a bunch of other local acts, including players from Do Make Say Think, Ohbijou, Flowers of Hell, Sunparlour Players and many more. Yes, they blend elements of post-rock, roots music, indie, ambient and pop, but, no, they don’t sound anything like Broken Social Scene. Instead, picture the dreamy space-blues of Mazzy Star backed by the cinematic orchestral rock of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, with a bit of Portishead atmospherics thrown in.

At first, it’s so easy to get so lost in the dense layers and the glistening beauty of Lisa Conway’s vocals that you miss the actual songs. The more time you spend with Oneiric, however, the more the melodies and hooks become ingrained in your brain. Del Bel haven’t played many shows, but they have no problem duplicating the mesmerizing textures live, making them one of the more promising local acts to emerge this year.

Top track: Missing And Done


NOW | December 1-8, 2011 | VOL 31 NO 14 - NOW magazine

WED NOV 30, 2011
MUSIC
Del Bel: Oneiric
Out of Sound
BY: STUART BERMAN
GRID RATING: 7/10USER RATINGS:
For a band that lists no fewer than 15 members in their CD’s liner notes, Del Bel deals in a surprisingly sparse brand of countrified cabaret pop-noir. Their ranks include Do Make Say Think’s James Payment on drums, The Happiness Project’s Karen Ng on sax and Ohbijou’s Heather Kirby behind the production boards, but Del Bel is ultimately commandereed by shadowy musical director Tyler Belluz and his vocalist foil Lisa Conway.
By frontloading its breezier numbers, Oneiric tricks you into expecting an unthreatening set of rootsy, CBC Radio 2–friendly pop, but Belluz takes a Brothers Grimm approach to the album’s construction, pitting Conway’s innocent coo against increasingly ominous backdrops. Centrepiece track “Beltone” piles on scabrous, spaghetti-western guitars and shrieking string lines, and by the time we reach the piano-tapped dread of “Invisible,” Conway’s once-sprightly demeanour has hardened into a ghostly, dead-eyed stare. Oneiric might leave you wishing that all this creeping tension would explode into unhinged release, but this carefully plotted debut suggests that the big payoff may be yet to come.
Playlist Picks: “Beltone,” “Missing and Done”
Del Bel play the Silver Dollar (486 Spadina Ave.) on Dec. 3. - The Grid TO

The Neighbourhood Mixtape is a collection of newly-released songs by Toronto musicians. The mixtape is meant to celebrate Toronto's music culture and provide a forum to listen to and discover new local music.

Every Sunday, I post a five-track mixtape (along with my own mini-reflections for each track) that you can download or stream as a soundtrack for the week.



Track #1: Evening Hymns, "Asleep in the Pews"

"The songs about Dad I'm really proud of, and I think that as a complete piece Spectral Dusk is a great picture of our relationship," Jonas Bonnetta said in a Call & Response interview. The new Evening Hymns track "Asleep in the Pews" (available for free download) expresses a heavy emotion - a memory and a lasting longing for closeness.

Track #2: The Darcys, "Edmonton to Purgatory"

The Darcys released their self-titled LP for free download this week via Arts & Crafts. Their track "Edmonton to Purgatory" demonstrates the band's ability to shift gears and switch pitch, from jarring trails of psychedelia to slow-moving ecstatic textures, fuzz and distortion.

Track #3: The Soupcans, "Pop Hit III"

The Soupcans' pack it tight in Vintage Pizza Party Cassette, an album full of raging fire and propulsive punk. "Pop Hit III" swoops with screams, leaving bruises wherever the sound lands.

Track #4: Del Bel, "This Unknown"

Del Bel's LP Oneiric is a record to look forward to this fall. We featured their blissful (and Broken Social Scene-sounding) track "Dusk Light" earlier this summer. Now, we're lucky to give you another preview of their song "This Unknown"; it shudders with a noir atmosphere of foreboding and serene percussion and horns.

Track #5: Bry Webb, "Rivers of Gold"

Constantines front-man Bryan ("Bry") Webb digs for solitude in the rambling track "Rivers of Gold", a song taken from his upcoming solo LP Provider (November 15th). "I was waking up early in the morning / I was sleeping on the ground / I was swimming in a sky of falling river/ I was driven by the sound," sings Webb, his voice echoing long and deep in all directions.
- blogTo

What do you get when you mix members of Do Make Say Think, Broken Social Scene, The Happiness Project, Bry Webb Band, Ensemble, Flowers Of Hell, Ohbijou, and Sun Parlour Players together in one band? An amazing collaboration that deserves your immediate attention is what.
Del Bel, the above mentioned collective, is primed and pumped to bring their release Oneiric, their debut LP, to the masses with a release tour starting nest Friday, November 11. No surprise that the band has spent part of this past year scoring two indie films; their sound is cinematic, with dramatic touches of moody pop and soul.
Oneiric has an official release date of November 11, but you may be able to grab yourself a digital copy by heading over to their Bandcamp page right now. Physical copies are coming soon courtesy of Guelph’s Out of Sound Records. - Quick Before It Melts

Joni Mitchell – “Little Green”
I grew up in northern B.C., and in the last years of high school, I began to housesit for neighbours and family friends fairly regularly. It was a good way to have my own place, and have time alone. One time I housesat a large farmhouse on the top of a mountain-like hill. It was the last house on the road, and you were able to look down at the whole valley from the porch. I had to put the chickens to bed every night, accompanied by the owners’ three big dogs. It was in the middle of winter, February maybe. The weather had been very unpredictable – it had rained the night before and then dropped well below zero, and then snowed, leaving a thick layer of ice on the road with a layer of snow overtop. It was too slippery to walk on even.
And so, I had to drive up the long, unplowed, and winding road in the wild thick dark of the woods to make sure these chickens would be locked into the coop and safe from the coyotes, knowing that if I hit the brakes I would be sliding all over the place and likely in the ditch immediately. The only music in the car was my parents’ copy of Blue on cassette – my Discman was broken or lost. The drive took ages, and the heat in the car barely worked, so I was wearing mittens, trying not to notice I could see my breath, and humming along to “Little Green”. It was my first time actually listening to the record. Feeling very vulnerable and very much alone, Joni Mitchell was my guide. And a good one she was.
- Lisa Conway of Del Bel
Photos by Andrew Collins - Iceberg

Del Bel began in the stu­dio as an out­let for the com­po­si­tions of Tyler Bel­luz, a Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist. The tal­ents of Bel­luz must run deep, since to list them all on the Del Bel press-kit required the lib­eral adjust­ment of the page layout. He is the prin­ci­pal com­po­si­tional force behind the col­lec­tive, and plays double-bass, electric-bass, drums, gui­tar, accor­dion, organ, and, musi­cal saw on the artist’s forth­com­ing debut, Oneiric. From what I gather, the final instru­ment on the list is not some sort of saw-toothed syn­the­sizer but a very real and very sharp hand­saw played with a bow, much like a violin.

Bel­luz has the cre­den­tials to be a one man band, but he’s also recruited ample assis­tance since he began work on Oneiric in 2010. Del Bel has evolved into a col­lec­tive effort, and the album cred­its reveal—when you make it past the sur­prise men­tion of the musi­cal saw—that Bel­luz is sup­ported by an ensem­ble of epic scale and experience. To list all the projects in which the collective’s dozen mem­bers have been involved would require a ver­i­ta­ble ret­ro­spec­tive of Toronto indie-rock since the turn of the millennium. Members of the col­lec­tive hail from Bro­ken Social Scene, Do Make Say Think, Bry Webb Band, Hap­pi­ness Project, Ohbi­jou, Flow­ers of Hell, Sun Par­lour Play­ers, and count­less other bands that I haven’t both­ered to list, but which are prob­a­bly wor­thy of mention. The link between Del Bel and these illus­tri­ous acts, how­ever, is cemented by more than shared members. Del Bel is a child of the cre­ative orgy that spawned super-groups like Bro­ken Social Scene in the first place. These artists share a col­lec­tive her­itage in an era of free love and free down­loads, where a band does not rep­re­sent an exclu­sive rela­tion­ship, and where the amount of projects a respectable musi­cian may be involved in is lim­ited only by the num­ber of accounts he or she can bother to reg­is­ter on Face­book and MySpace. The inher­ent philo­soph­i­cal frame­work seems exem­pli­fied by the scene in Toronto, although Bel­luz insists that it’s become a world­wide phenomenon. “I don’t think Toronto has more col­lec­tives then other cities,” he explains. “In our case, we don’t want to be con­fined to play­ing the same stuff, day in and day out. It’s quite excit­ing try­ing to remem­ber the songs in the mid­dle of concerts.”

Del Bel plans to per­form with a (mar­gin­ally) stripped-down ensem­ble of nine. “I still have other peo­ple that recorded on the album that want to join live” Bel­luz jokes, “but I think I gotta keep this band smaller than a hockey team.” Already, the col­lec­tive is so large that trans­porta­tion to shows requires a car­a­van of automobiles. Nevertheless, with nearly all nine mem­bers involved in three or four addi­tional active projects, I won­dered whether logis­tics might prove prob­lem­atic. “I haven’t run into too many prob­lems try­ing to orga­nize this 9 per­son band,” Bel­luz explains, “but by all means, I need to book these peo­ple way in advance.” With regard to cre­ative process, Del Bel seems to have hap­pened upon a func­tional dynamic rare for bands of such size. Belluz over­sees the artis­tic direc­tion of the col­lec­tive, but encour­ages other mem­bers to con­tribute to the com­po­si­tional process, with the obser­va­tion that, “it would seem a bit con­trol­ling to direct some­one on how to cry into their instru­ment for desired effect.” Thus, Del Bel has coa­lesced into a more per­ma­nent fix­ture, poised to step from the shadow of the pro­lific resumes of its membership.

Oneiris, a term that sig­ni­fies a sur­real state, is an apt title for the album—slated to be released on Fri­day, Novem­ber 11th in CD, vinyl, and mp3 format—which evokes a thick dream­like atmosphere. Like a dream, its full of unex­pected twists and turns. The eleven tracks on the album all sound very dif­fer­ent. A-Side “No Reser­va­tion” and B-Side “Invis­i­ble” give a pretty accu­rate indi­ca­tion of the vast range of styles represented. Nevertheless, the tracks seem united by a com­mon bond that is dif­fi­cult to pinpoint.

A sig­nif­i­cant part of the bond is Lisa Con­way, whose dynamic vocals and fresh lyrics mark the Del Bel aes­thetic. Bel­luz describes Con­way as a major cre­ative force behind the project, and frames her role in the band as all but crucial. Therefore, I was sur­prised to learn that Oneiris was ini­tially recorded as an instru­men­tal album. Belluz hints that it took a bit of coer­cion to get long-term co-collaborator Con­way on board with the project at first. “She only quit three—maybe four—times,” he jokes. “Tech­ni­cally the songs were con­ceived as weird lit­tle instru­men­tals. But I knew in my heart she would be the (only) one to sing on them.” Upon fur­ther lis­tens, how­ever, we may notice the mark Con­way’s inde­ci­sion has left on the music. Del Bel seems to draw its unique per­son­al­ity from the uncer­tain mat­u­ra­tion process. To imag­ine how it might have sounded oth­er­wise would be to imag­ine Harry Pot­ter with­out the scar, or to imag­ine the Cana­dian topol­ogy unmarred by glac­i­ers that carved it’s lakes and moun­tains. “I still can’t imag­ine any­one else’s reac­tion to try­ing to fit vocals lines to the instru­men­tal tracks, con­fesses Bel­luz. Conway’s addi­tions are shaped by the unique demands she faced in fit­ting vocal parts to com­po­si­tions that had devel­oped with­out them. She has taken great care not to intrude upon the music’s instru­men­tal core. The tracks unfold at a leisurely rate, and Oneiris includes sev­eral instru­men­tal inter­ludes. For instance,“Invis­i­ble” forces the lis­tener to wait nearly a third of the track time for vocals to drop. When they finally do, Conway’s line main­tains a taste­ful def­er­ence to the ensem­ble, buried behind wispy synths and a per­sis­tent piano drone.

In gen­eral, Del Bel devotes a lot more atten­tion to instru­men­tal detail than the typ­i­cal indie band—even the typ­i­cal twelve mem­ber indie band, if such an arche­type exists. This comes across not only in the shape of each com­po­si­tion, but also in the intrigu­ing arrange­ment of acoustic and elec­tric ele­ments. The whis­pers of key­boards wash over earthy drum grooves and the unpre­dictable slaps and creaks of a dou­ble bass. Ample credit is also owed to Heather Kirby, who mixed the tracks. All tracks on Oneiris sug­gest a focus on tim­bre over melody or har­mony. “No Reser­va­tion”, for instance, builds toward a cho­rus unusual for its stark lack of har­monic move­ment, anchored by a mem­o­rable riff force­fully deliv­ered in uni­son by vocals and instruments. The tune evokes the cabaret-jazz of a bygone era, but it does so with decep­tive min­i­mal­ism, cap­tur­ing the vibe but reject­ing the details. I recalled a mem­o­rable trum­pet solo on the track but upon repeat lis­tens, I sud­denly real­ized that there is no trum­pet solo whatsoever. A few growls and single-note burst evoke the sen­sa­tion as con­vinc­ingly all the bor­rowed notes of a Dizzie Gille­spie solo. In that respect, Oneiric seems philo­soph­i­cally a closer rel­a­tive to a film score than any album by the indie-rock col­lec­tives from which it draws members. And indeed, Del Bel has con­tributed to numer­ous film scores, which is a nice accom­plish­ment if you remem­ber that the group has yet to play its first show or release its first album.

In short, the inge­nu­ity of Del Bel shines through in the grand scale of the vision, and in the tact­ful pre­ci­sion with which it has been real­ized. Lis­ten­ers will be seduced by the top-notch pro­duc­tion and arrange­ment, while the emo­tional weight of the com­po­si­tion and nuanced musi­cian­ship will keep them hooked. This music has a lot of lay­ers, and it’s bound to res­onate with most audiences.

Nate Green­berg - Ampeater Review

November is a weird month. Kicking off with the Day of the Dead, it is a stark reminder of the dark days ahead as winter approaches. What better way to ease into the changing seasons than with music that assuages the weather and urges us to stay indoors? If ever there were a band that could accommodate said needs, it would be musical collective del bel with their debut album Oneiric.

Based out of Toronto and comprised of members from Do Make Say Think, Broken Social Scene and Ohbijou, Oneiric’s sound captures the cyclical and contrasting nature of things in full spectrum, from uplifting and ethereal to eerie and foreboding. The entire album unfolds accordingly, with opening track Dusk Light, a shimmering and hypnotic pledge to that magical time of day, starting off slow then dropping in strong and steady with Jimmy P Lightning’s driving and hypnotic drumming. Stirring Bones follows suit, carrying the torch of the lighthearted and whimsical straight into the heady, slow and sublime soundscapes to come with tracks like Missing And Done, and the ever brooding and enchanting Beltone.

Vocalist Lisa Conway delivers each song with such bittersweet gusto, effortlessly capturing the mood of the album as it grows darker and more enigmatic. Ever a memento mori, No Reservation wakes up tired bones as it opens with heavy baritone sax and swings into an upbeat chorale in celebration of our mortality. The album comes to a close with cryptic hymns like the beguiling This Unknown and Slave To The Deep, with its swirling organs, followed close with Invisible’s ominous and haunting piano. Paying homage to the beauty in both light and darkness, Oneiric closes with sinister yet seductive Shadow, reminiscent of an elegiac Tom Waits track.

With nine members in total, del bel’s orchestral dynamic is characterized by their cinematic other worldliness; Oneiric truly is a surreal journey to the depths of the obscure and unknown.

NICOLE PROFOUS - Indie Machine

Broken Social Scene is gone, which means that there’s a hole in the “absurdly large, Canadian indie-rock collaborative” part of the music universe. Thankfully, Del Bel is here to take up that space, both in size and sound.

And it’s quite a collective, encompassing at least ten people (according to the Facebook page). Some of them have been in Do Make Say Think, The Happiness Project, Ohbijou and (surprise, surprise) Broken Social Scene, among other bands listed. But all this pedigree wouldn’t matter if the songs sucked. Is Del Bel’s Oneiric worth the hype?

Very yes. The members of the band draw on their extensive indie rock histories to create a diverse album of gently rolling, evocative, moving indie rock held together by a cinematic strain running through the tunes. Opener “Dusk Light” is a slow-builder that falls between The National and Portishead, but with a lilting female vocalist. “Stirring Bones” falls next, and it falls on the New Pornographers side of things, even invoking She and Him a bit. But instead of being disparate, the two seem like logical extensions of each other, both held together by legato guitar lines living just beneath the surface of the tune. Even though the first uses the subterranean guitar to press the tempo and the latter uses it to rein in the shuffling groove, the sound locks in to the listener’s mind in the same way.

It’s not the only marker that transfers across these gentle, beautiful tunes. The forlorn mood that so invokes High Violet is on display in “Beltone” and “No Reservation,” although the latter jazzes it up a bit with woodwinds and rumbling toms. The Portishead comes out in the separated beats and immense space of “This Unknown” and “Slave to the Deep.” A dash of The Walkmen’s dramatism is applied throughout, although the band never appropriates the trademark Walkmen yowl. These songs are primarily gentle, not caterwauling.

The control that Del Bel Oneiric asserts over its sound is incredibly impressive. By restraining any impulse to get frenzied, they have created a well-tuned set of songs that translate into a well-coordinated album. It’s rare that I hear an album that works on an individual song (local) level and a whole-album (global) level, but Oneiric does. Highly recommended for fans of melodic, artistic, evocative music. - Independent Clauses (USA)

Between the eerie church setting and string section of young girls, this Southern Souls video fits perfectly with Del Bel’s haunting ballad “Beltone”. You might not recognize the band name (yet), but you’ll surely recognize some of musicians in the video. Del Bel are a new Toronto-based collaborative project that draws members from notable Canadian groups such as Do Make Say Think, Ohbijou, Sunparlour Players, and Bry Webb Band.

Their debut album Oneiric was released on November 11th, through DIY imprint Out of Sound Records. It provides a dark and eerie cinematic experience that will both haunt you and keep you humming along. The album is available on the group’s Soundcloud - CHARTattack magazine