The Beat Escape - Shadows of Ecstasy (2022)

With their second LP, Montreal’s The Beat Escape have written themselves out of their own demise. They may or may not still exist, but continue to produce some of contemporary music’s most sophisticated contemporary music, with a third LP slated for release sometime next year.

The story of Shadows of Ecstasy ended before it began, with cursed tech leading to thousands of hours of excruciating attention to detail appearing to vanish in an instant. Only the tentative track names remained. Most bands would have been flattened by the prospect of losing a completed album. And we cannot ignore the pressures already mounted upon The Beat Escape, who navigate rigorous private lives that have helped define the ever-sharpening contours of post-masculine elegance in the 2020s, with vocalist/keyboardist Adam Ohr and vocalist/keyboardist Patrick Lee expanding the known bounds of joyless snobbery, joyful snobbery, and sleek urban tumbling.

But The Beat Escape saw an opportunity for rebirth, rebuilding the album from the ground up with a radically simplified analog setup, spitting in the face of each and every one of the endless options offered by modern technology. In the final accounting, the immediacy of the recordings better served the mystical themes of Ohr’s lyrics, some of which were inspired by reading about Kabbalah on Madonna's wikipedia page, and then by candlelight in private libraries throughout the city. Others he claims are based on specific life experience, but only noticed this after re-listening to those songs several hundred times later.

Album highlights include “Illusions of Success,” which succeeds in wedding truly despondent imagery to a luminous synth-pop odyssey. Meanwhile, “Ash Extracted from Ash” can be described as either a meditation or an interrogation, if that sort of thing somehow appeals to you. Finally, “Running and Returning” faithfully evokes the sound of getting married in heaven immediately after dying in a marathon. To mix these rich and varied soundscapes, they were able to secure the services of Francis Latrelle (Priori), their first and only choice.

Within this nightmare chronology lies a sense of ancient depth that may reveal itself instantaneously or over time following its purchase via Bandcamp. And that may prove to be more than any of us really deserve.