It’s a tale as old as time itself: right as a well-regarded group of Underground Renown™ makes moves towards the mainstream, they decide to go on hiatus, and the legacy of these once-promising wonders becomes less a monument than it does a hazy mist. We’ve all heard it and seen this happen too many times, which is why we now have the learned behavior of simply taking the spoils and quietly moving on to the Next Great Whatever.
For Rolf Klausener, though, that very cliché became his life. In 2010, his evocative low-key acoustic numbers were reaching their widest audience yet, and for good reason. Although his band the Acorn has been kicking around since the early ’00s, it was the release of their 2010 disc No Ghost that kicked things up a notch, with Klausener re-discovering the emotional power of negative space, noting how a few light strums and a light backbeat was all that he needed to create immediate catharsis. No Ghost is easily the Acorn’s best album, and before long, the song “Almanac” wound up soundtracking a rather beautiful little scene in the excellent 2011 comedy Crazy Stupid Love. The band seemed poised to finally make their breakthrough (thank you, Steve Carell).
Fun fact about that breakthrough: it never happened. Klausener and the other founding members of the Acorn were spread all over their Canadian homeland, so in 2011 they just decided to go on hiatus, Klausener making occasional public appearances but for the most part staying low until he began sifting through sketches and scribbles in 2014 to make what we now have before us: Vieux Loup, the band’s fourth proper studio full-length.
Yet right from the onset, something is a bit off with Vieux Loup. While no one was expecting No Ghost Mk II this time around, Vieux Loup nonetheless lacks confidence in its own abilities, striking a lot of the same poses we’ve seen from the band before, but doing so in such a way that we as listeners feel we’re being kept at an emotional distance. Opening number “Rapids” has light percussion, ambient bell tones doing strong texture work in the background, and those ever-present so-simple-its-brilliant guitar strums that make the basis of all those great Acorn numbers that have shown up on playlists made by trusted friends. This time around, though, Klausener’s too-close-to-the-mic vocals are swapped out in favor of heavy reverb and ambiance, making it difficult to hear what he’s singing sometimes.
It’s a change that may seem arbitrary to some, but losing that one bit of intimacy with Klausener’s voice is in fact a huge loss, because while his lyrics range from vaguely heavy on analogy (“Rapids”) to deeply symbolic (closing winner “Artefacts”), his voice is nonetheless a powerful ingredient to the whole affair. By muzzling those plainspoken everyman tones he hits so well, we are kept at bay, as if Klausener feels that the music by itself is all people needed to connect with the Acorn in the first place. It’s true: some of the melodies here are strong and evoke No Ghost‘s best moments, but right there on “Influence”, that microphone-in-a-cavernous-room vocal treatment makes for a potent distancing agent, which is a shame given that the nice little mid-tempo groove achieved on “Influence” makes it an easy album standout.
However, even with that in mind, there are some rather beautiful tracks at work here. “Cumin” comes off as the most “classic-sounding” track in the bunch, with its plaintive guitar strums serving as the framework for a quietly beautiful rising action as the song rolls along, a sharp contrast to the bland waltz of the title track. Extra credit goes to the propulsive “In Silence” for making the most of Klausener’s well-played buildups, as that track culminates in a loud, clanging drum section that feels like an up-tempo reward for those who have stuck all the way through Klausener’s evenly-placed musings.
Vieux Loup means “old wolf” in French, and, perhaps inadvertently, a theme of pregnancy runs through the lyrics, from the repetition of the phrase “long contraction” during “In Silence” to the image of a character sleeping with the hand on the top of their belly during closing number “Artefacts”. Whether this was a conscious theme or not, it almost doesn’t matter in the end, as there is little fun in deciphering an enigma if the enigma carries low purpose. After the confident aire that helped make No Ghost as good as it is, Vieux Loup feels like a regression, a “safe” record that fails to capitalize on the growth we were seeing throughout the Acorn’s tenure. During “Artefacts”, Klausener mentions “A congregation of distractions / Knocking at my door,” and one can’t help but wish he listened to them, giving a little bit more energy and interest to a disc that ends up being more of a holding pattern than a great revelation.