Barenaked Ladies' 13th studio album, 2021's
Detour de Force, delivers much of what the long-running Canadian band's hardcore fans are here for. Arriving almost 30 years into their career,
Detour de Force is a thoughtfully constructed record with songs that reveal the group's continued knack for balancing intimate, often humorous personal sentiments with more anthemic feel-good moments. Once again front and center is lead vocalist
Ed Robertson, who has remained the band's primary songwriter since the departure of co-lead singer
Steven Page in 2009.
Robertson has grown as a performer and many of his songs here, including the opening "Flip" and "New Disaster" (the latter an incisive rumination on the 24-hour news cycle), are pleasantly hummable and emotionally affecting. The band take a bigger swing on the tongue-in-cheek party song "Roll Out," a track reminiscent of their past hits like "One Week." Part of
Barenaked Ladies' charm has always been their ability to amp up large pop audiences and then step back to offer up a more relatable, small-scale world view that feels like it comes from their own personal experience. Lending some of this poetic relatability to the album is keyboardist
Kevin Hearn, who contributes a handful of his own poignant songs. In "Big Back Yard" he dreams of the perfect home for his family, while "Bylaw" finds him being humorously woken up by a maintenance worker at 7 a.m. More widescreen in tone is "National Park," in which he ruminates on how seeing a rhinoceros in the wild can open one's soul to the smaller beauties that surround us every day. ~ Matt Collar