Thoughts on Laughing's Because It's True

There’s a strange thing that happens to me while I’m listening to expertly written and played power pop: I start to think about Deism, or whatever I half remember about it from high school. Specifically, my mind is drawn back to something called the “watchmaker analogy.” According to Adam R. Shapiro, writing for The Atlantic in 2015,

The most famous version [of the “watchmaker analogy”] comes from the English clergyman William Paley’s 1802 book Natural Theology. Just as a watch is made up of several different pieces, “framed and put together for a purpose,” he reasoned, so too are natural objects—eyes, ears, wings, and bones—made up of parts that combine to serve a higher function. As the watch is the design of a watchmaker, nature is the product of a designing intelligence, or God.

To push this (already tortured) comparison perhaps too far: to me, an immaculate power pop song—one that’s on the level of a “Go All the Way,” a “September Gurls”, an “I’ve Been Waiting,” a “Sparky’s Dream,” or (hell, let’s just go there) an “And Your Bird Can Sing”—feels like it has been constructed by a perfect, Godlike intelligence. It’s like a beautiful watch, “made up of parts that combine to serve a higher function,” designed and then set in motion to run, exquisitely, forever, or for something like two minutes and twenty blissful seconds. Encountering a perfect power pop song makes you wonder why anyone ever bothers to write or listen to any other type of music. It is an all-consuming experience—one that, perhaps to return us to Paley’s Natural Theology—can approach the spiritual if the right conditions obtain. The song’s design is just so compelling.

Montréal band Laughing’s new album Because It’s True contains 11 of these exquisite “watches” across a lean 37-minute run-time. The album has completely captivated me since its release last week. Laughing is something of a supergroup, comprised of a murderers’ row of players from across Canada. Jesse Locke, in an insightful review of the record for Paste, captures it all most succinctly:

Multi-instrumentalist [Josh] Salter might be best known for playing with Dylanesque indie-rock quartet Nap Eyes—who recently returned with three new songs—but don’t miss his former band Monomyth. Drummer [Laura] Jeffery formerly thumped the tubs for Fountain, the livewire post-punk band she shared with her brother Evan (now a rising Montreal-based hip-hop producer). Human Music may be the most notable project from prairie-born skateboarder [Cole] Woods, while [André Charles] Thériault runs a popular pizza joint in Montreal’s Little Italy.

What is perhaps most striking about Because It’s True, though, is how effortlessly the music comes off given the players’ pedigree. Credit for this unshowy classicism needs to also be given to producer Renny Wilson whose light touch across the album, to use modern parlance, lets them freaking cook.

Laughing’s debut single “Bruised” (sung by Salter) was the first I heard of the band and the track’s weapons-grade hooks have gradually become emblazoned on my grey matter, replacing my ability to recall ostensibly more important things like what I ate two nights ago, what I did last week, or any prime minister before John Diefenbaker. Instead of remembering any of those things, I just hum the song’s stellar chorus to myself a few times, fixating on that beautiful mandolin(?) fill trilling along in the background, giving the track a slightly gauzy feel.

The record’s second single, “Will She Ever Be A Friend of Mine,” showcases another important side of the group. Sung by Thériault, there’s a deeply Byrds-y jangle to the tune, and—as can be found on several other of Because It’s True’s cuts (“Easier Said,” “Narcissist Blues,” “Garden Path,” and “Sour Note” all come to mind)—a thrilling bridge where Thériault wonders aloud, “Hard to know when to just leave it alone / Hurts to know when your last chance has been blown / Now you’re on your own” before the entrance of a lovely, economical guitar solo takes us out. I challenge you to think of a better use of two minutes and thirty-one seconds.

Because It’s True’s second side has been revealing itself more to me over the last several days. The aforementioned “Will She Ever Be a Friend of Mine” starts us off in McGuinn Mode, before we take a brief detour into the bittersweet, slide-accented, midtempo ballad “You and I.” Then “Don’t Care” (sung by Jeffery) provides the record with a slacker, country downer moment, before the Salter-sung ballad, “Glue,” another Thériault-sung gem, “Sour Note”, and, finally, the fragile “Secret” ends the album. Says Jim Allen for Bandcamp Daily of the album closer: “a lambent ballad that could pass a blindfold test as a Doug Yule-sung V.U. outtake.” I couldn’t agree more.

The album is sounding exquisite to these ears here in the early days of summer in my hemisphere, and I can only imagine that it will get better as the temperatures keep climbing. It is a perfect refutation to recent breathless critical handwringing about the purported “death of bands.” Sure, on the surface bands may appear to be “dead” if one restricts the analysis to focus solely on the streaming charts where the pop star as atomized, late-stage capitalist mega influencer-preneur abounds. If you look at the underground, however, that perception quickly changes. Bands will always exist as long as, in Thériault’s words, people remember “how fun it is to get loud and rock out with your friends.” That’s what Because It’s True most emphatically conveys. Through authentic homage to its influences, it is a love letter to adored bands of yesteryear, and to the joy of collective music making in pursuit of the perfect watch song.