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The Rest - "Coughing Blood (Fresh Mountain Air)"
The Rest - "Drinking Again"
Somewhere in a forest cottage, in this quiet tuckaway beside a lake, seven sought silence as a stage to set their sounds. Before them: an audience of anonymity and an opportunity to put away the competing forces of everyday life. Behind them: an album's worth of lessons learned, six years of history, and the rich backdrop of the Ontario winter. Taking all the grandiosity you'd expect out of a seven-person, string-laden pop outfit to the unadorned stage of a lakeside cottage, Everyone All At Once sings sweet reconciliation between simple and complex, quiets and louds, earthy and otherworldly.
Even at its upbeat points, the album is threaded with some unspoken sound of elsewhereness. This cold sense of distance is clear in "Coughing Blood/Fresh Mountain Air," a drama inspired by lead singer Adam Bentley's great uncle, who would walk up a mountain daily to visit his mother in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Few bands can pull off starting an album with a five-minute song as slow and somber as this one. Vulnerable, yearning, sweeping, the song lays down an intense tone for the album, but Bentley sees it as one of hope.
Indeed, the album balances all its drama with not only hope but some slyly tucked whimsy, bouncing from a panic on using the wrong laundry detergent to the quip, "I could be great, I could be the gravy on Thanksgiving day" and working in, out, and across a spectrum of tones and emotions. As "Sheep in Wolves' Clothing" raves, "We could roam as far as we like." And the band did literally roam far for this recording, retreating first to the cottage to write all of the songs before finishing the recording process in a church-turned-recording-studio and band family basements. Despite laying down the album in simple quarters and throwing in some humble witticism, The Rest's sound has a distinct, theatrical fullness to it, comparable to a more subtle Arcade Fire or a fuller, softer Band of Horses.
Which makes "Drinking Again" so distinct. It's the only song on the album that's as simple as a man and his acoustic guitar, a heavy turn from the freeing, voyaging lilt of "Apples & Allergies" just before it. "Drinking Again" swells in and out of its breathy, basic sparseness to a surrendering falsetto that serves as the dizzying acoustic embodiment of an empty bottle in an emptier room, hands held to head unsure of what they've done.
Just this kind of emotional depth and breadth perfectly speaks to The Rest's audio-poetic mastery. At its darkest, it's hypnotizing. At its lightest, endearing. Everywhere, it is engaging. Roaming far as mountains and near as nervous fear, the Rest takes you where they were, and you begin believe that's where you belong. The Rest stirs up their orchestra and asks the world to play, Everyone All At Once.