The Rest

I can’t remember when the first time I checked out “The Rest”. I know I did once before and I initially thought just “meh”. I think that could’ve been the biggest mistake I made while blogging. I’ve had a change in heart when the band e-mailed me giving a chance to check out their newest full length. Simply put hands down, this Hamilton seven piece could be up to big things upon officially releasing “Everyone All At Once”. Yes, it’s not released yet (it’ll be out in April but I just couldn’t wait to review it); they are just giving it away to many bloggers where, they have thrown words around like “masterpiece” and many otherhyperboles. Say what you will, but it’s very fitting.

The Hamilton seven piece doesn’t strike me as a typical large group of musicians by listening to them. It is becoming very trendy to have 8 or so members with classical influences but The Rest isn’t one of those bands. The Rest choose a more subtle path and straying away from grandiose fashion (at least from a musical perspective). I personally forgot they were such a large band, seeing some live videos of their performances show some intricate mixing that doesn’t seem quite apparent on the first few listens.

Hmm where to start on this album? There’s a laundry list of things I want to discuss on this awesome album. (Just release it already, the critics better like it).

The vocals are top notch and by top notch, I mean the highest fucking quality attainable (pardon my French). Adam Bentley, and Co.’s vocals are really quite surprising, other then the pure emotion he’s able to portray across songs, and he has more range then any singer off the top off my head. By range, I mean being able to switch from a high falsetto voice on Drinking Again, a happy medium and a low National type voice on the closing/title track Everyone All At Once. Simply put, Bentley the band can steal the show on vocals and while it may overdone a bit too much, like the lung boasting on Drinking Again. Still, I am quite impressed.

The musicianship is like icing on the cake. I’m personally not blown away by it but every time I examine it a little more, I come off feeling more and more impressed. The Rest takes lessons in not shoving it down your throat and sticking to a more folky style at times with a hint of a slow progression throughout each song. I also find things mend very well, facilitating Bentley’s vocals talent and only coming out of shell at the right times. They create perfect moments of climax where Bentley and the band are battling where the clear winner is the listener. Nothing seems overly contrived even when each instrument is raging full throttle.

I have a hard time picking stand outs, each song is well thought and beautifully intricate. Even if some songs aren’t your favourite like Drinking Again for Ack of Herohill, I personally like the novelty of a singer being able to hit such a high note (and the music in the background saves the day on this track). Early favorites were Sheep In Wolves Clothing, Walk On Water and Modern Time Travel but realistically everything caught up after giving it a little more effort.

Personally, I feel the urge to just place the entire album up online since it’s a travesty you can’t buy it right now. It’s worth every cent. This album is just great all around; calling it a masterpiece isn’t a reach. Calling them the next Arcade Fire, doesn’t do them justice either. The Rest, with Everyone All At Once have forged a sound of their own. With a stunningly great album, they could be well on their to way to becoming the next great Canadian band. Will they achieve those levels? It’s not for me to decide, I can just ramble on and on about how great this album is.

Rating: 5 out of 5
My second 5 out of 5 of this year, albums like The Rest’s Everyone At All Once don’t come around all too often. I’ve been debating this score over the last month and I’ve literally ended up listening to it alongside my favourite albums ever where it fits perfectly within that group. Paul of Wolves, Hawks and Kites called it “-albums like this are what make music blogging worthwhile”, so very true. - AW Music

Big, anthemic songs wrapped in heavily orchestrated strings- I’m hearing great hooks here; the vocals recall both the yelpings of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s Alec Ounsworth and the plaintiveness of Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch; the music is akin to Arcade Fire’s brand of baroque pop with a dash of The National’s shadowy melancholia thrown in for good measure- but it doesn’t do this band justice by lumping them into those easy comparisons. Showcasing a vast array of styles, Everyone All At Once is exactly that- you get everything all at once. Retreating to the faraway northern woods of Ontario to record this record, this band has crafted a genuine masterpiece- fully realized, beautifully crafted and dynamic in scope; The Rest should be the next big band to come from The Great White North, and if they aren’t on critic’s “year-end/best-of ‘09? lists I’m formally lodging a criminal investigation to as why they aren’t. Grade: 9/10 - The Musicologist

Another good Canadian band. Go figure. For the songs on their new album Everyone All At Once, Hamilton, Ontario's The Rest got their Bon Iver on (not like Justin Vernon was the first to write songs in isolation, but you catch my drift). The band drove away from the city, bringing the basic necessities: food, clothes, liquor, and instruments. Amidst the tranquility of a lake and the forest, the band wrote songs until the sunset each day. Everyone All At Once is the product of those songwriting sessions. The Rest creates music steeped in grandiosity. Take the absolute winner of a track "Apples & Allergies," an epic song somehow packed into a mere three and a half minutes that sounds as if Edge snuck into the studio and added those unmistakably U2-esque guitar sounds. Lead singer Adam Bentley's voice is a thing to behold and he proves equally adept at the quiet moments as he is at the soaring and anthemic. Lyrically, Bentley runs the gamut from melancholy ("Drinking Again") to whimsical (On "Phonetically, Phonetically," Bentley sings: "I could have been great. I could have been the gravy on thanksgiving.") When at their most sonically unhinged, The Rest's music plays like something akin to the weirdest/most beautiful moments of a Michel Gondry film. Take, for example, "Walk On Water," which builds from lone piano notes and Bentley's fragile vocals into an onslaught of beautiful noise. Sometimes it's overwhelming, but Everyone All At Once is an album of great scope that accomplishes real beauty in both its moments of chaos and measured precision. -- Capt. Obvious - Captain Obvious

Our consistent readers may have noticed over the last couple of years that we do not often criticize the artists we record — that often our reviews are quite positive. We feel this is the result of our research and show selection — we are not going to record a band that we do not believe is worth the time and effort. What follows is undoubtedly our most positive review, but one earned with much work and many hours of research.

For the NYCTaper Presents show this past Friday at Monster Island Basement, we spent months in careful selection of the artists who would perform that night. We literally began working on this show in March, which coincidentally was the first time we heard new material from the Ontario band The Rest and their new CD Everyone All At Once. We were familiar with the band and their first CD, which we liked quite a bit. But this new CD, as we reported back in March was an whole different ballgame — this material had the x-factor, the kind of release that would change the careers and lives of the artists that produced it. We were fortunate enough to have recognized this early, and had enough foresight to ask The Rest to play our early-stages-of-planning next show. They accepted and the details were worked out.

In the meantime, Everyone All At Once began to gather a heap of praise far and wide. The Rest received positive words and “song of the day” status at NPR, and glowing reviews from Herohill Blog, MP3 Hugger, Indiecater, Quick Before It Melts, Baby Stew, Rawkblog, AW Music, Music Under Fire, Whale in a Cubicle, Indie Music Database, Pop Wreckoning, I Am The Crime, Tympanogram, Swear I’m Not Paul, Mojophenia, Stereo Cupcake, Laughing Evergreens, Eldur Og Is, Eaten By Monsters, Captain Obvious, Pirates of the Bargain Bin, The Needle Drop, Hypeful, The Blah Blah, The Overcast, Leonard’s Lair, Indie Rock Cafe, Sound Proof Magazine, and The Musicologists. There isn’t a single negative review to be found about this album.

So it was with much anticipation that we geared up to see The Rest live at Monster Island Basement on Friday. And now we are prepared to go out on a limb. The Rest are absolutely destined to become a huge band. The one and only time I’ve made a prediction of this magnitude was in February of 2008 when I saw the Antlers and wrote about their “can’t miss” talent. In that post, I predicted the Antlers would sign to a major indie label (they did — Frenchkiss signed them in May), and would play mid-major venues (the have played Bowery Ballroom and Music Hall of Williamsburg twice). In another parallel with The Antlers (and Hospice), The Rest have also produced an album of such magnitude, that although is not currently distributed by a label in the US, is destined to be picked up by a major indie on its superior quality alone.

On Friday in the intimate downstairs venue, The Rest performed a stunning 35 minute set of seven numbers, with six from Everyone All At Once and one from the first CD Atlantis Oh Our Saviour. The septet were each proficient at their instruments and despite the small sound system, all fit well within the mix. However, it was the breadth of creative energy at the apex of each song that was truly stunning — seven talented musicians in a perfect unison performing expertly crafted and complex songs. It was truly breathtaking experience to witness this set from ten feet in front of the stage.

Of course we recorded audio of this set. And sadly, among the nearly three hundred concerts we’ve recorded for this site, it is perhaps the one recording that least captures the experience of the moment. We are not disappointed in the sound quality, as its quite good. We used the fine DPA cardioids from close range and captured a clear and faithful audio recording of this set, audio system limitations and all. However, even the highest quality audio rig can not grab the magic from the air — we’ll leave it to our readers to listen and imagine the joy in the basement that night. Enjoy! - nyctaper

A few weeks back, I had ordered a physical copy of Allegories’ Surreal Auteur, one of my Top 40 of 2008 and an album I reviewed here, but by mistake, I was sent a copy of The Rest’s sophomore album Everyone All At Once (The Rest is Allegories’ Adam Bentley and Jordan Mitchell’s other band with five additional members, including Anna Jarvis, Blake Bowman, Dwayne Brydon, Matty Buzanko and Steve Jones) and a limited, hand-crafted edition of their single Apples & Allergies. There couldn’t have been a more fortuitous error. Everyone All At Once is like the natural world seen through ambling, hyper-speeding youth, tripping over tongues and blinded by the sun. Since Allegories largely used non-verbal vocals, The Rest allows for a different lyrical facet as Bentley’s vocals pitch between a graceful dreaminess to a crazed fragility. There’s an organic wholeness to the record that evokes that inspirational ensemble feeling that Canadian bands from The Arcade Fire to Broken Social Scene seem so adept at, and the entire record feels like a victory as songs build and build to ecstatic heights. There’s always a feeling of anticipation and tension in these songs, generating a heart-quickening buzz.

Incredible, stately viola and violin begin the album as the first track, Coughing Blood/Fresh Mountain Air, slowly drifts into your head. Bentley’s vocals are desperately beautiful as more instruments join in and the calm waves of perfectly rounded melodies progress into a more frenzied state. The lyrics are original and evocative:

A vampire Transylvanian
I’ve heard them all
Sanitorium
I’m coughing blood
And I wait
The only thing that’s real
I recover
With a fever
Sincere
My head is freezing
By the fire
Lungs
Reduced in air

You really feel as though Bentley is gasping for air as he yelps “I can hardly breathe.” The following track, Modern Time Travel (necessities), also begins in an understated, sparse way before it, too, sweeps you up in a triumphant torrent; Bentley sings “High above the sunny sky/I realize I’m going” as his voice wavers with the sheer momentum of being launched into the heavens. While no less propulsive, Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing is a delicate, almost folky, song with driving, spiralling segments of triplets, which aurally imitate the lyrics about feeling literally at sea because of another’s identity confusion. The music appears to take a sobering turn with Phonetically, Phonetically, which remains slower and allows Bentley to extend his vocals in wide swathes of soaring colour, much like what was featured in Allegories; oddly enough, the song takes a playful, banjo-inflected corner a couple of minutes in, and then one of my favourite lines: “If I was a figure of speech then we’d all be erased.” Communication problems are eloquently sung through the metaphorical screen of language, maintaing some of the tension felt through the first few songs. Released single, Apples & Allergies, continues with the uplifting feel and a tantilizing sense of wonderment through lyrics like:

Crossing my arms to cover my eyes
Moving pictures of apples
Demoralized
There I wake to find myself only five
Debating whether toads are frogs in disguise
And if pigs fly
Crossing my eyes to focus

There’s a brilliant delight in the possibility of the periphery and a different way of looking at the world.

There is a slightly quieter subtlety to Drinking Again, which, unlike the previous songs, stays in a pocket of mournful stillness. It is soft enough to allow for hearing every vibration of Bentley’s vocal cords, including honest breaths and swallows. The music picks up again with the bouncy, shambolic Blossom Babies Part Two; like many of the previous tracks, it has a desperate quality to it, a fierce questioning and burning need to believe in a certain version of life’s story. Bentley hits some gorgeously haunting notes before he launches into “Tell me, tell me, tell me/You had sex on the patio/And that’s where you fall in love/You fall in love/We fall in love.” The hum of viola opens Walk On Water (auspicious beginnings) before the tapping of snare and frantic guitar begins to accelerate the song into a freewheeling summer day; it feels like an endless race into a baptismal lake. As with most of the earlier tracks, The Lady Vanishes takes some time to build to its pumping escape. Humans and language meld and intertwine again:

I know that they treat you right
But the ellipses on your face
Have been filled in with observations of mine
I’ll chisel your bones
To take you home
Just to stare at your eyes
I’ll fashion an umbrella from your placenta
And sail on to the sky
I know

People become vessels for words as physical bodies become tools, and the sky continues to hold dreams and promise. The album concludes with the rather verbosely titled, Everything All At Once A) The last great cocoa owl job B) In my attic, souvenirs. It is broken between its two lettered components, the former being a rather jaunty melody, and the latter exploding into a whimsical ballad before coming down to near silence for “But here we’re hiding in the cold cellar/Kissing in complete silence/A coma with cartoon colours/Glue my eyes shut/Never to be found again.” The record fades away to the same strings that opened it.

The music of Everyone All At Once feels like a spiritual re-awakening, sometimes liberating, sometimes overwhelming. There’s a grasping at hope and a breathless commitment to exploring language; it becomes an endless struggle to see yet not to see too much. Just as all band members join in for the musical equivalent of a perfect, bittersweet memory, all the thoughts, emotions, and observations of humanity flood in and culminate in one flailing catharsis. The record has so much life (some of it has to be relegated to parentheses). - Condemmed To Rock n Roll

Being the sole proprietor of a 3+ year old music blog, I tend to get a ton of email on a daily basis from publicists, labels, venues and bands. And, unfortunately, I simply don’t have the time to read a large number of the emails I get — or, more importantly, to listen to the music that I’m sent. I try, I really do, but if I listen to 50% of the music I get, that’s a pretty good day.

So why do I mention this? Certainly not to scare anyone off from sending me music.

Rather, I mention it because, every once in a while, when I happen to have 4 or 5 free minutes, I’ll randomly pick one of my unread emails and read and/or listen to whatever it is that I happen to have been sent.
(Sidenote: I do not, ever, under any circumstance, listen to anything labeled “Remix” or “Party mix”.
I simply do not understand the concept of the remix.)

And that’s exactly what I did this morning with an email that I got about the band The Rest. And I cannot tell you how glad I am that I did. The band, which hails from Hamilton, Ontario, is set to release its second album, entitled Everyone All At Once, and I gotta say — it’s absolutely stunning.

Beyond “stunning”, though, I have a hard time accurately describing the album. It’s dark, and sweeping, and orchestral, and emotional, but still none of those words really do it justice. It’s so much bigger than that. I guess the best thing I can say is this — on the day that Wilco’s Wilco (The Album) leaked, THIS is the album I choose to spend more of my time with.

Take a listen to the incredible first track from the album:

The Rest, “Coughing Blood/Fresh Mountain Air” - Baby, You Got A Stew Goin'

With seven members and a Canadian address, Ontario's The Rest may have trouble avoiding comparisons to The Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene. But unlike its more serious countrymen, this young band always keeps its sense of humor intact. Exhibit A is a prominent press photo, which shows The Rest (plus a dozen friends) in a comic tableau that looks like a still from a Benny Hill sketch. Those other bands wouldn't dare.

But The Rest still makes serious music. Bands this heavily populated sometimes face a tendency to pack on the layers until an album collapses under its own weight. The title of The Rest's recent sophomore album, Everyone All at Once, suggests such an overload, but each track contains plenty of breathing room without sacrificing the lush textures of a large ensemble. Part of it is the band's tendency to expand outward, as in the five-minute stunner "Walk on Water (Auspicious Beginnings)."

Beginning with organ, piano and cello, this pocket orchestra provides a nice bed for singer Adam Bentley's artfully unsteady vocals. All of which builds up to a Pet Sounds-influenced bridge that brims with interlocking percussion, wet reverb and falsetto harmonies. Later explosions and pauses hint at Arcade Fire-esque bombast, but they're not as dramatic. Take, for example, the way Bentley's worried lament — "Oh God, she knows / She knows, she knows, she knows" — comes in response to his partner finding out what detergent he uses. The title's a bit misleading, but the "auspicious beginnings" part sounds about right - NPR

This is a different entry for me, but it's a rare treat when you get to watch friends, acquaintances and complete strangers fall in love with a band as they play right before their eyes. Such as the case with The Rest at the NYC Taper event on Friday, June 19 at Monster Island Basement. Somewhere between Anna's first draw on the bow, and when Adam Bentley hit a high with ease and perfection, my friend Heather (who had never heard them) turned to me, eyes wide, and said something that I'll never forget, something that made me remember the power that music still has over people:

"Oh my god. My heart."

About that time, the audience honed in. The usual chatter that you hear at shows rippled back into silence and admiration. And their attention was held for the next 40 minutes of their set. It was a joy to see, and as the show went on, the band fed off the energy and attentiveness; keys hammered, drums beat, bows lashing, and strings picked in a synergistic unison of highs and lows. I could not have been happier for Adam and crew. This is not to take away a thing from the other wonderful acts that played at the intimate event (Coyote Eyes, for instance, gets their own write-up shortly.) But Hamilton, Ontario's 'The Rest' were playing in front of strangers in a strange land. But the audience responded with enthusiasm, and New York owes gratitude to Todd and Dan for bringing The Rest across the border to play. Here's to many happy returns. - On Another Note

Somewhere in a forest cottage, in this quiet tuckaway beside a lake, seven sought silence as a stage to set their sounds. Before them: an audience of anonymity and an opportunity to put away the competing forces of everyday life. Behind them: an album's worth of lessons learned, six years of history, and the rich backdrop of the Ontario winter. Taking all the grandiosity you'd expect out of a seven-person, string-laden pop outfit to the unadorned stage of a lakeside cottage, Everyone All At Once sings sweet reconciliation between simple and complex, quiets and louds, earthy and otherworldly.

Even at its upbeat points, the album is threaded with some unspoken sound of elsewhereness. This cold sense of distance is clear in "Coughing Blood/Fresh Mountain Air," a drama inspired by lead singer Adam Bentley's great uncle, who would walk up a mountain daily to visit his mother in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Few bands can pull off starting an album with a five-minute song as slow and somber as this one. Vulnerable, yearning, sweeping, the song lays down an intense tone for the album, but Bentley sees it as one of hope.

Indeed, the album balances all its drama with not only hope but some slyly tucked whimsy, bouncing from a panic on using the wrong laundry detergent to the quip, "I could be great, I could be the gravy on Thanksgiving day" and working in, out, and across a spectrum of tones and emotions. As "Sheep in Wolves' Clothing" raves, "We could roam as far as we like." And the band did literally roam far for this recording, retreating first to the cottage to write all of the songs before finishing the recording process in a church-turned-recording-studio and band family basements. Despite laying down the album in simple quarters and throwing in some humble witticism, The Rest's sound has a distinct, theatrical fullness to it, comparable to a more subtle Arcade Fire or a fuller, softer Band of Horses.

Which makes "Drinking Again" so distinct. It's the only song on the album that's as simple as a man and his acoustic guitar, a heavy turn from the freeing, voyaging lilt of "Apples & Allergies" just before it. "Drinking Again" swells in and out of its breathy, basic sparseness to a surrendering falsetto that serves as the dizzying acoustic embodiment of an empty bottle in an emptier room, hands held to head unsure of what they've done.

Just this kind of emotional depth and breadth perfectly speaks to The Rest's audio-poetic mastery. At its darkest, it's hypnotizing. At its lightest, endearing. Everywhere, it is engaging. Roaming far as mountains and near as nervous fear, the Rest takes you where they were, and you begin believe that's where you belong. The Rest stirs up their orchestra and asks the world to play, Everyone All At Once. - The Overcast

Without going too deep into how much better Canadian indie bands, as a rule, seem to be than their American counterparts over the last decade, Everyone All At Once is just some astounding shit. The Rest are an Ontario band. This is their second album. But it moves with the grace and tremendous power of an act with a searing, undeniable vision and mountains of emotion that seldom translates into music this epic, if only for lack of funds. And yet, the album begins with the richness of “Coughing Blood/Fresh Morning Air,” a song soaring into the heady heights of, oh, “Staralfur” or “How To Disappear Completely,” replete with what seem to be the real strings of orchestral fantasias underpinning drifting guitars and their singer’s straining falsetto. It’s less coughing blood than a rush of it to the head.

The Rest aren’t the only band to approach this territory recently, but where an act like Shearwater favored Talk Talk’s more minimal approach on last year’s Rook, Everyone is as maximal as the title implies. And why not? So much is lost in restraint, and while ambition is a gamble, the Rest rarely play a poor hand. There’s the occasional misstep – “Phonetically, Phonetically,” is a track that could pass a cousin to Radiohead’s “Nice Dream” until it clomps and stomps into a jarringly poppy Wolf Parade homage complete with la la la’s. The song recovers quickly and goes back into dream-rock mode, though, and all is forgiven. The more bombastic moments are tempered by the tender folk of songs such as “Drinking Again,” a plucked acoustic ballad that sounds like the product of a bedroom, a four-track and a particularly lonely night. “Blossom Babies Part Two” is a bouncy indie-pop track that swells into something more guitar-damaged; “In My Attic, Souvenirs” is a sad clown of a song, drowning its sorrows in insistent drumming.

I know I’ve been a fountain of praise recently, but you’ll have to trust me when I say I’ve left my hyperbole at the door this year. We’ve been gifted with a full array of new classics in recent weeks: Grizzly Bear’s spectral folk, Harlem Shakes’ Technicolor rock, St. Vincent’s mad hatter jams, and now, the Rest’s sweeping chamber-dream-pop. Let it carry you to Xanadu.

- The Rawking Rufuses To Stop