Album Review: Lake Forest — Silver Skies
Jeanette Blanchard
Gateway Writer
Feb 15, 2012
Lake Forest
Silver Skies
Verité
With all the gloomy chill of a desolate winter, Lake Forest’s Silver Skies could make even the heartiest Canadian want to curl up next to the fire with a cup of hot chocolate.
Lake Forest is the self-proclaimed “melancholic folk music” of Will Whitwham, singer and songwriter of the Canadian group Wilderness of Manitoba. Whitwham’s first solo album is inspired by a place in Illinois he read about in Dave Egger’s A Heart-Breaking Work of Staggering Genius and Whitwham’s recurring dreams of a family cottage from his childhood. The album encapsulates a sense of chilling isolation and nostalgia towards the landscape of Canada with its reverberating vocals and haunting guitar riffs.
While the layered vocals and country guitar style are reminiscent of artists like Bon Iver and Band of Horses, Lake Forest’s debut album doesn’t live up to the musical prowess of its contemporaries. While tracks like “Autumn Skies” and “Whispers” include catchy dream-like melodies and traces of unexpected country twang, the lyrics are simplistic and non-descript. Purely instrumental tracks “Teepee” and “Cathedral” are engaging and stylistically cohesive, but only intriguing due to their ambiguous titles.
Silver Skies isn’t a stimulating, high-energy album, but there is beauty behind its tranquility. The track “Silver Stars” has a trance-like melody that ends with a delicate piano and Whitwham crooning about “The golden hills / in the summer time,” weaving a sense of optimism through an otherwise melancholic album.
While there’s not much truly groundbreaking about Silver Skies, Whitman’s first solo project away from Wilderness of Manitoba is a pretty, serene album that truly encapsulates the tranquility of a Canadian winter.
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