Hamilton, Ontario indie rock band Basement Revolver have captured our attention with two great EPs in the last few years. The outfit, comprising of Nimal Agalawatte, Chrisy Hurn and Brandon Munroe, craft an expansive and spacious sound that’s lit up with a slow-burning emotional resonance, centring around Hurn’s impassioned vocal delivery. Their music combines the magnitude and granular glitter of shoegaze, the personal songwriting of bedroom pop and the cathartic noise of 90s indie rock.
This summer the band released their debut full-length album, Heavy Eyes, which brings together some of the material from their previous shorter releases and adds some great new songs too. Opener ‘Baby’ is one of these new ones, an expansive and emotive indie rocker, all echoing vocals and clattering drums. Hurn also gets to let her vocals soar, as the track descends (or maybe that should be ascends?) into pure purging sound. Not that the song’s themes are necessarily as grandiose as that sounds. “Baby is about feeling sad and down even though you are generally happy about everything and everyone in your life,” Hurn explains. “It is about crying a lot and my tendency to retreat when things get too overwhelming, to spend all day and night in bed and watching Netflix and eating Doritos.”
And this gets to the heart of something wonderful about Basement Revolver. They play a double game of big and small, switching from quiet personal sentiment to big bombastic broadcast, often within the same song.
One of our favourites from the last few years, follow-up ‘Johnny’ was the track that proved the breakout hit for Basement Revolver. We described the track previously as “a rather desperate plea for another to stay away from the titular character, a person who seems to have broken the heart of our narrator.” Again it displays all of Basement Revolver’s qualities, and comes complete with a catchy chorus too. ‘Dancing’ on the other hand feels direct and driven, a song about overcoming 21st century malaise by doing something fun or adventurous. “Break out of your shell,” Hurn urges, “and dance, or get some fresh air,” as drums slap and guitars gallop.
‘Knocking’ is perhaps the most poignant track on Heavy Eyes, one which sees Hurn ball up all of her hurts and worries and set them alight with a beam of bright white openness. Inspired by a letter she wrote to her family, the song confronts past mistakes with a sense of both vulnerability and determination, and becomes something restorative in the process. “I basically kept telling myself that I was garbage, broken, unlovable,” Hurn explains. “I think that ‘Knocking’ was my way out of that dark place.”
‘Johnny Pt. 2’ is the sequel to the earlier song, the drums this time a little more insistent, the choruses wider and brighter. The narrative switches from the previous desperation to a melancholic acceptance, a display of love despite everything, and the offer of a second chance should the possibility ever emerge. Next up, ‘Words’ opens with melodramatic guitar and cymbal crashes, Hurn’s vocals levitating above like oil on water. The song faces the existential dilemma of communication, how “words are just words are words are words,” lacking any tangible meaning unless backed up with something more real.
“Really starting to feel like I need someone to talk to,” Hurn sings at the start of ‘Tree Trunks’, a song that is rich with a sense of weariness and yearning. Deep percussion rolls around as blasts of guitar ring out like thunder on distant hills, the atmosphere accentuating Hurn’s message rather than smothering it. This transitions into the more upbeat ‘You’re Okay’ (“I have friends who say they love me, Hurn sings, “remind me daily they’re thinking of me”), and the relentlessly heavy title track, which sounds like a long-lost 90s underground hit.
The album closes with ‘Diamonds’, perhaps its slowest and most reflective moment. The song unfurls from a stripped back ballad, sinuous atmospherics shifting behind Hurn’s vocals, to a final wall of sound crescendo, the perfect final reminder that Basement Revolver can do both the micro and the macro at once.
Heavy Eyes is out now on Sonic Unyon and Fear of Missing Out Records.
