Album Review: Boats - A Fairway Full Of Miners
- Written by Kenneth McMurtrie
Anyone in need of a Superchunk fix should wrap their ears around this gem from Winnipeg quartet Boats (& yeah, we know you don't have too long to wait for the real thing now but still ...).
Vocally there are a lot of similarities between the two bands but musically Boats carve out their own niche with some spacier, more pop leaning sounds in their repertoire (for example on A Fairway Full Of Miners' tracks such as 'Animated GIFs' and 'Great Skulls'). There's also a reasonable amount of cheesy toned keyboard noise going on too.
This is a fun album that also nods towards Of Montreal occasionally but without taking any fully fledged flights into wig-out town (apart from maybe on the opening part of the two minute 'O Telescope', which turns up at about the halfway point of the album). Sanity is generally though maintained throughout. There's a sweet, childlike quality about the work as a whole which is cool for them to have maintained over the six years of their existence. Who else at the moment is singing about a need for information on bears? Or bioluminescent ones when they get down to specifics?
As for the album title we can only guess as to whether there's a veiled reference to Caddyshack being attempted with that or wonder at what the leisure time pursuits of miners in Manitoba might be. A quick 18 holes after a shift underground might be the done thing there. And that cover could representational of many things or nothing. Either way there's good work being done by this group that you owe it to yourselves to make the effort with.
A Fairway Full Of Miners is out now and available from amazon