The Dears : Life Is Beautiful! Life Is Beautiful! Life Is Beautiful!

(Next Door Records)

Released 7 November 2025

Vinyl | CD | Download

Canada’s melodic indie rockers The Dears return after a five year absence with their new album Life Is Beautiful! Life Is Beautiful! Life Is Beautiful!. Martin Gray gives them a first ever listen and is completely enchanted by the depth and scope of their top notch songwriting.

Of The Dears, I have to confess I knew next to nothing up until now. Despite the Montreal-based band having existed for 30 years and garnered a respectable following winning over critics with their melodic and cinematic brand of orchestral indie rock-cum-chamber pop, yours truly has never previously heard any of their music and has been completely oblivious to their existence. For that unfortunate oversight I now attempt to make some sort of redress.

In the early 2000s, a slew of bands from the US and Canada started to make waves across the Atlantic and grab the attention of the UK press with their widescreen symphonic pop which – at the time – seemed like a breath of fresh air: bands like Arcade Fire and The Polyphonic Spree, among others. The former were among one of the most successful of the Canadian bands of that period to cross over to huge UK success.

However, five years before their formation, in 1995, it seems like The Dears had already begun to map out a similar blueprint, although their sound was shorn of the bombast that was such a trademark of Arcade Fire (and Polyphonic Spree) and was more focused on the classicism of pop through the decades – keeping true to the various genres and influences that have shaped their music – whilst also being undeniably rousing and emotional when accompanied by swells of strings and brass arrangements. Ambitious in scope, it’s little surprise that they soon became one of the defining acts of the so-called ‘resurgence’ of great Canadian indie bands at the start of the new millennium.

Listening to their latest – ninth – album, the emphatically-titled Life Is Beautiful! Life Is Beautiful! Life Is Beautiful!, it’s hard to dispute this judging by the quality of the songwriting here. It really is an eye [and ear] opening record that’s remarkable in its overall consistency and excellence.

A soothing analogue organ drone accompanied by guitar opens the first track Gotta Get My Head Right before chief songwriter and vocalist Murray A. Lightburn intones the first words ‘Suck it up buttercup / This is just the beginning of what’s to come’….. it quickly blossoms into a mid-paced guitar-chugger before it unexpectedly changes course and tempo at the half way mark into what sounds like a different song, underpinned by a spacious chorus guitar-driven passage with heavenly choir-synths and piano arpeggios around which the song rides out before it then abruptly stops.

 

The first few guitar notes that open, and then run throughout, second track Babe, We’ll Find A Way are a direct steal from Dr Hook’s 1979 UK number 1 When You’re In Love With A Beautiful Woman. This unexpected quirk is probably just pure coincidence as the song is pleasantly uptempo and pushed along by propulsive drums before another rousing outro is reached where Murray’s vocals start to soar. Just as you think the song is going to climax as it scrapes the stratosphere it ends suddenly – something which recurs throughout this album (all of these, which interestingly mostly end on the off-beat, must be a band speciality).

Track three Doom Pays could quite feasibly be a long lost Roxy Music song – the sax driven number brings to mind Bryan Ferry’s mob (e.g. Do The Strand) and is another defiantly infectious stomper that comes as a pleasant surprise. Murray even makes out like a very passable Ferry soundalike in places. The song is a deft earworm thanks to its nagging refrain ‘You know it’s not always set in stone’ right up to its [again] brusque ending.

The Dears’ influences may straddle the decades of the 1960s to the 1980s, but the songs here are so cleverly crafted that – other than the stylistic nods already alluded to above – it would be churlish to try and dissect too deeply. Nevertheless, the soulful brass-augmented canter of Deep In My Heart reminds me of some of the old 1970s soul tunes that I grew up listening to and strikes an unexpectedly nostalgic chord within me. Either that or I must be getting more sentimental and always yearning for a past long consigned to the fading mists of time. But it’s when Murray’s vocals aim towards the heavens halfway through here that my goosebumps really start rising.

Gorgeous downtempo ballad This is How We Make Our Dreams Come True is another tune that seems to evoke something inside of me that hankers for a bygone era through its twinkling arrangement (a magical combination of guitar and glockenspiel shadowing each other – do you remember how the intro to Radiohead’s No Surprises moved you on first listen?). The evocative lines ‘Don’t need no one to tell us / just who the hell we’re supposed to be / no one here is living by your rules…. We’re fighting for ourselves, while suffering the losses…. We’re fighting for ourselves, and all the hopeless causes…. Fighting for ourselves, until the war exhausts us….’ hit me square in the gut and bring a lump to the throat. This is an absolute gem of a song and it once again makes me ponder on how I had never previously come across music by this band before.

 

 

Traces of Serge Gainsbourg and The Smiths (two more influences proudly worn on the sleeves here) characterise Dead Contacts, an effectively touching ode to the loss of a dearly loved one which maintains the pathos and poignancy, and it’s at this juncture that I realise that the middle part of the album wields the biggest emotional punch. This momentum is maintained on the next track Our Life where Murray’s vocals start to assert themselves in a more forceful register when he repeats the refrain ‘This is our life! This is my life! This is your life!’ before the song concludes once more in typical abrupt fashion.

Socio-political lyrical tropes again form the bedrock of the resolutely rousing Tears Of A Nation (even the intro sounds like a deft nod to U2 !) where Murray’s lamenting of the parlous state of our world move him to righteous agitation towards the end. He spells out his determination to do his bit to right the injustice that he sees and after declaring that ‘I don’t want to walk away’ and ‘We need to fight to the end’ he then shrieks ‘I don’t think I can stay!’ It’s clear where his heartfelt intentions lie, but when the musical accompaniment to his grievances is this strong – witness the insidiously nagging guitar motif getting under your skin – you are left in no doubt as to the sincerity of his sentiments and thus you concur with him that continuing down the road of apathy is not the best option.

Tomorrow And Tomorrow again sounds like a tune from a half forgotten era but it’s a ravishing string-backed song with a message of hope and positivity and has the sort of euphoric melody in the chorus (‘Tomorrow is another day!’) that is both celebratory and uplifting. The closing pair of ballads wind things down nicely – Life is Beautiful being a lovely slow burning duet between Murray and his partner in the band and keyboardist Natalia Yanchak, whilst Don’t Go, despite its almost mournful and consciously downbeat tempo, is an emotionally moving plea to solidarity and loyalty in the face of adversity and the unforgiving rollercoaster of ups and downs (‘Stay close, but not much closer / We’re bro…brothers forever…‘).

In context, the title may be a touch on the ironic side given just how messed up everything is with the world presently. Perhaps it’s more intended as a pronouncement of the view that, despite all the horrors that we see around us, there is no denying, suppressing or extinguishing one’s hopes – no matter how much in vain – for a better world. Ergo the deliberate, mantric repetition of it three times here, as if to say: ‘life is beautiful – and it’s there to be lived and treasured’ or ‘life is beautiful, as long as love transcends hate’, or, more idealistically, ‘life CAN be beautiful….if only we can bring an end to all the ugliness’. Maybe the latter is the embodiment of the bittersweetness and valiance that ultimately courses through this set of songs.

 

 

This is a consistently strong album. Put simply, there are no fillers or weak songs here: each one is a succinct and perfectly arranged piece where the production never contrives to become overwrought or melodramatic for the sake of it. Throughout, Murray’s vocal cadences are just the right side of earnest, soulful and passionate, completely free of artifice, bluster or unnecessary hamfisted histrionics, and it’s what makes this record so eminently warm, approachable and indeed life-affirmingly human.

I think I’m now wholly converted. Better late than never, I suppose.

 

Review by Martin Gray. Other articles and reviews by Martin can be found in his profile.

 

 

The Dears can be found on Bandcamp and Facebook

Purchase Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! here