Detour De Force

Barenaked Ladies' 13th studio album, 2021's Detour de Force delivers much of what the long-running Canadian band's hardcore fans are here for. Arriving almost 30 years into their career, Detour de Force is a thoughtfully constructed album with songs that reveal the group's continued knack for balancing intimate, often humorous personal sentiments with more anthemic feel-good moments. Once again front and center is lead vocalist Ed Robertson, who has remained the band's primary songwriter since the departure of co-lead singer Steven Page in 2009. While Page's burnished tenor remains a much-missed element of the group's classic sound, Robertson has grown as a performer and many of his songs here, including the opening "Flip" and "New Disaster" (the latter an incisive rumination on the 24-hour news cycle), are both pleasantly hummable and emotionally affecting.

The band take a bigger swing on the dorky, tongue-in-cheek party song "Roll Out," a track reminiscent of their past hits like "One Week," but which makes you wonder how it might have worked just a bit better with a tweak from Page. Still, part of Barenaked Ladies' charm has always been their ability to amp up large pop audiences and then step back to offer up a more relatable, small-scale world view that feels like it comes from their own personal experience. Lending some of this poetic relatability to the album is keyboardist Kevin Hearn, who contributes a handful of his own poignant songs. In "Big Back Yard," he dreams of the perfect home for his family, while "Bylaw" finds him being humorously woken up by a maintenance worker at 7 a.m. More widescreen in tone is "National Park," in which he ruminates on how seeing a rhinoceros in the wild can open one's soul to the smaller beauties that surround us every day.
All Music Guide.