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Sound Advice: Crimes by The Mohawk Lodge
Every Tuesday, Torontoist scours record store shelves in search of the city’s most notable new releases and brings you the best—or sometimes just the biggest—of what we’ve heard in Sound Advice.
Two years ago, in an attempt to broaden his audience, White Whale Records founder Ryder Havdale moved his Vancouver-based cooperative solo project, The Mohawk Lodge, to Toronto. Last month, his/their third album Crimes was released, and shortly after, the Dakota Tavern housed a month-long weekly residency where Havdale’s stacked, dirty folk came to life as it helped him hash out all the personal shit that makes up the bulk of the addictive new album.
Recorded in a Washington cabin with an assembled band and drop-ins from other Vancouver favourites Dan Mangan and Leah Abramson, Crimes is saturated with a bad break-up, though Havdale definitely owns his vulnerability as the record’s roughness reads as catharsis, and even its quieter moments (“Days When You Die”) are filled with rousing, reverb-soaked group vocal support. The juxtaposition of Havdale’s gritty vocals singing words as vulnerable as these makes for an almost uncomfortable first listen, and the immediate thick, warm guitars and melodies on songs such as the killer part-Springsteen, part-Constantines (wait, is that redundant?) song “Wrong Side of the Bars” (streaming above) are intoxicating. “Roll With the Punches,” near the end of the album is a big, stomping song declaring loneliness, reclaiming it, swerving into a dark, fuzzy punk verse, back up into a vintage rock and roll rave-up, and down into a big, dreamy riff—a bit all over the place but never out of control—which seems perfect indicator of the place from which this album was born.
This one’s a bit of a hidden gem; fans of Havdale’s underrated labelmates Eamon McGrath or Octoberman, or Winnipeg treasure Greg MacPherson could totally sink their teeth into this. Now that he’s got this girl business off his chest, Havdale’s next venture could be even better, though as it stands, Crimes is still pretty killer.