Doug Hoyer - Walks With The Tender & Growing Night

Reviewed by Grant Stovel, host of Lunch Box, Notes From Home, and Alberta Backstage Series

Walks With The Tender & Growing Night takes its title from an excerpt of a poem by 19th-Century American poet Walt Whitman; much like the poem, Doug Hoyer's latest album is joyful, energetic and imbued with a great sense of yearning for the sublime. It's the latest project from a young Edmontonian musician who has spent the past several years releasing 7" singles, cassettes and EPs full of the kind of whimsy and passion that Whitman's poem "Song of Myself" evokes.

The recording projects have ranged widely -- he's become quite well known as a champion of sweet, ukulele-driven pop music, and has also garnered acclaim for the pastiche of pop, beats and abstract sounds that he creates under the moniker "Bike Month". The new album certainly will be greeted by Hoyer's fans as a natural bringing together of just about all of many musical elements that he's displayed in his discography to date.

It encompasses not just the full spectrum of Hoyer's range of expression and creativity, but also of his immediate musical environment; it finds multi-instrumentalist Hoyer in the company a panoply of other talented musicians, many of whom are part of the Edmonton-based Old Ugly Recording Company -- a record label known for its DIY attitude and its diversity of musical styles, ranging from hip-hop to acoustic folk. The gamut of sounds on Hoyer's new full-length disc would be dizzying if it weren't for the fact that it all serves the music so well; all those cellos, bongos, ukuleles, drum machines, trombones and vocal groups somehow belong perfectly together on Hoyer's winsome, lovely songs.

August 26, 2011