by Chris Hatch

All killer, no filler – pop masterpiece, Energy Bar, is collaboration at its finest

Heaven For Real return with their sophomore album, Energy Bar – a record that takes the experimental, wonky pop of this year’s brilliantly named Sweet Rose Green Winter Desk Top Tell This Side Autumn Of The Fighter Hot In A Cool Way EP, and sharpens it to a point – dialling down the arty trippiness, amping up the pop hooks, and squeezing it all in to ten tracks that rarely breach the three-minute mark.

Energy Bar is a densely packed, half-hour of a pop record. Think of your all time top-ten, left-of-centre guitar bands, and nods to them are littered throughout the Nova Scotia group’s latest work. Floaty, Orielles-inspired vibes? See Do Your Worst. A nod to Paul Simon’s Graceland? Check out the shuffling counter-rhythmic percussion and soft synths on the title track. Fancy a bit of Sebadoh, Pavement, Daniel Johnston? Mid-album point, Lately, does the job – an amalgamation of some of your favourite lo-fi bands, its naively sweet melody and sauntering guitar lines sounding like a gem that’s been in your record collection for years.

The band are made up chief songwriters, Mark and J. Scott Grundy; synth player/percussionist, Cher Hann; and drummer Nathan Doucet. It’s no surprise to learn that the Grundy brothers are twins – something about the collaborative, yet cohesive nature of the record, feels like it could only come from a place where such a unique bond exists.

And it’s that collaborative element that truly is the record’s strongest point. Each track is packed full of ideas – little counter melodies spring out of nowhere, interesting, textural synth lines emerge from the back of the mix, and, most strikingly, Doucet’s drumming can all of a sudden yank a track in a different direction – veering from skittering, Talking Heads-style snare-heavy work, to hurried, drum-n-bass/jungle patterns. There’s some ingenious guitar work at play here too – Further The Thrill is anchored by a guitar riff that sounds like a banjo roll, and it has the same kind of country/Americana twang that Little Kid perfectly utilised on Transfiguration Highway‘s Thief On The Cross. Underwater Song begins with soft, playful, plucked guitars before a searing finger-tapped pair of solo guitar lines burst forth – a melange of two other Canadian bands: the jangle pop of Ducks Ltd meeting Kiwi Jr’s slacker hooks.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what makes Energy Bar such a good record. It’s so lean, so free from filler, so infused with interesting ideas, and yet, crucially, so far removed from self-indulgence and navel gazing. It really is a unique pop record – 2nd Grade’s Peter Gill fronting Vampire Weekend, or The Byrds doing math rock, or The Beach Boys abandoning multi-part harmonies and going lo-fi. Heaven For Real is an exploratory yet economical songwriting feat.

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