Wintersleep

New Inheritors (Labwork)

By Amanda Stovall
Published: June 6th, 2010 | 7:00am

After winning a Juno award for best group in 2008, Nova Scotia quintet Wintersleep are back with their first album in three years, New Inheritors. Adopting the album’s theme from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The New Adam and Eve,” the songwriting focuses on an often dark view of man’s finite existence in a fragile world, one plagued by self-entitlement, drug abuse, and fear of the dark. Like true prophets of the apocalypse, the band reminds the listener at the end of the album on “Mirror Matter” that “Happiness is all around you” and asks “Will you be ready when the lights go off?”

Judging by the band’s fusion of melodic country rock, found especially on tracks like “A Terrible Man,” reminiscent of Band of Horses and the often cryptic but morally thematic lyrics echoing Pedro the Lion, the lights won’t be going off for Wintersleep anytime soon. While New Inheritors introduces itself with slow strings and a repetitive tagline of “It’s bigger than you” in opener “Experience the Jewel,” the pace quickly picks up into familiar rock territory with “Encyclopedia” and carries itself from there, juxtaposing strong rhythms and quick, well-constructed guitar riffs with ominous lines such as "You are not permanent … Time is a knife blade engraved in your chest" on the title track.

The odd pairings continue in the bell-like riffs of the vampirically titled "Blood Collection"’s distorted rock and the sing-along chorus and symphonic crescendo of the macabre titled “Mausoleum.” Each track takes on a different auditory method of tackling dark subject matter, the unifying thread being Paul Murphy’s vocals, which fall somewhere between a broken heart and a whine, but luckily land in the middle ground of being enjoyable despite the deafening implications of the album’s dark subject matter.

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