Friday Morning's Regret

A great roots rock band from Toronto, ON, Friday Morning’s Regret have written a thoughtfully diverse album that speaks to their equal interest in breezy folk meditations and storming, smoky alt-country. When Lost At Sea finds the band enamoured with the soft, sad balladry by the likes of Richard Buckner but with equal affection for the guitar and rhythm experimentation of latter day Wilco-via-Sonic Youth. Primary vocalist Gavin Gardiner can play the drunken, broken-hearted man on the solitary "Darker Streets than Mine” but that’s because he knows full well that his band-mates are due to wallop the misery out of him with pounding musical flourishes. With its finger-pickin’ guitar and woeful harmonica, "Angst for the Memories” might be conventional folk were it not for Gardiner’s compelling lyricism. There’s great power in gigantic songs like "North Dakota,” where hoarse, trembling vocals streak a grungy arrangement and the band reveal a gift for composition in the multilayered "Requiem for Mary.” Ambitious and well crafted, When Lost at Sea will surely draw more converts to the cult of Friday Morning’s Regret.