By Michaela Maxey

Said the Whale has stepped outside their comfort zone in their astonishing new album Cascadia. While originally having mixtures of electric rock and folk from frontmen Tyler Bancroft and Ben Worcester on their last album As Long As Your Eyes Are Wide, each track on Cascadia moves between alt-rock, indie, and folk. Despite differing sounds, all tracks advocate for the same thing — love. Cascadia takes you on a winding road in its discovery of love in all its variations and imperfections while paying homage to the beautiful land itself. Like the varying cultures and flourishes of art from city to city in the bioregion of Cascadia, Said the Whale’s Cascadia varies from track to track, never settling into a specific sound and mimicking the beauty of diversity of this region.

The first track opens with a few piano keys and strums from guitars over a fuzzy background, almost as if the band is testing out the instruments before the song starts. Then the drums come in and set the beat. Worcester offers short lyrics, each line like a solid punch through the instruments that places an importance on what he’s saying. He opens with “Wake up, wake up/ Wake in the sound of the rising sun/See a bright light shine on the lions.” Each line acts as a call to action, to pay attention to the natural world around you. As the chorus comes in Worcester sings, “Time makes all things fall together”, and if anyone knows this it’s Said the Whale. They’ve been together since 2007 and have seen one another grow in the most personal ways possible: getting married, pains of miscarriages, and having kids. Despite all this, the trio of Ben Worcester, Tyler Bancroft, and Jaycelyn Brown has remained strong. Indeed, time does make all things fall together and acts as a running line through this album.

For artists like Said the Whale who tour for months at a time and are away from their families and home, love becomes essential in grounding them in their identities and in their homeland. In “Love Don’t Ask”, the band intertwines love as a pet-name and love the feeling so that the listener simultaneously thinks of both, making it inescapable. With a strong and consistent beat brought together by drums, guitar, and piano, the lyrics mimic this strength with a love that can “brave together/ uninspired in spite of the fires.” Although their may be moments of weakness, which can be heard in the disgruntled piano chimes in the song, this love has an end goal: “a simple life alone with you beside me would be paradise.” The next track that explores love, “Level Best”, is written by Bancroft to his son and underscores the lengths he’ll go to for him, “If you need a million dollars by tomorrow/ I will rob a bank to do my level best.”  With hard strums of guitars and strong vocals that enunciate every word, it becomes impossible to miss what Bancroft has to say. He definitely sets the bar HIGH, making it hard for any parent or lover to follow this up.  In “Love Always”, Said the Whale offers a creepy feeling to open with— just the guitar strumming, then vocals that echo making Worcester feel far away. As the chorus begins, the drums come in and offer a much more grounding sound that ends the echoing of the lyrics and brings Worcester back to Earth. Essentially, this song advocates that love is always the answer to whatever the issue is, and if we can remember that then we can solve anything. Most importantly though, there’s the element of time in all these songs. Nothing happens right away, but always looks towards a future that only knowledge over time can bring.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows when it comes to love, however. In “Shame”, Said the Whale explores what it means to screw up. In an interactive phone hotline promoting the album, the band describes “Shame” as a “powerful commentary about being a man in 2018 and the importance of listening to women.” This is important because there are so many stigmas revolving around masculinity, especially when it comes to being in a relationship. You can be sensitive, but not too sensitive. Attached, but not too attached. It’s a hard balance to juggle, and a lot of the times results in messing up a good thing. In terms of sound, the song may start off with a grunge/alt-rock feel, but it continuously slows down throughout, leading to an ending silence as the shame eats the person up. And this is where “UnAmerican” works perfectly with “Shame” as it also aims in flipping the notion of masculinity: “I wanna write you a love song/ I wanna get all the words wrong.” What?! A sensitive guy?! I didn’t know they made those anymore!  Being kind and sensitive, and being a male on top of that, is about as un-American as you can get because society constantly places value on being a tough male figure, both mentally and physically. With songs like these advocating how crazy this idea is, it’s only a matter of time until this stigma ends. I’ll be waiting!

At all moments of Cascadia, there is the undertone of the deep love the band has for the land. Many songs offer images of mountains and rivers throughout, and the band gives full tracks dedicated to their Vancouver home like the title track “Cascadia” and “Gambier Island Green”. Ultimately, this album takes us through the winding roads of Vancouver and traces all variations of love across a modern time (love for a child, love for a significant other, and love for the land). Although certain things may not work out in the moment, it is important to remember that time makes all things fall together. All we can do is let time work its magic to bring us back to the people and the places that mean the absolute most to us.