Neva Dinova - Canary [CD]

It’s a new chapter in the history of Neva Dinova. Although the band are beloved by many, they’ve never had the same name recognition as their Omaha-bred peers and collaborators like Bright Eyes and Cursive. However that’s likely to change with the band’s reinvigorating new full-length Canary, which features a new lineup, fresh perspective and a sound that’s more urgent than anything they’ve created in the past.

From the fuzzed-out grandeur of “Edge of Something” that kicks off the record through the electronica/hip-hop accents on album closer “I Can See Further Now,” the album sees Neva Dinova stepping out sonically and condensing their songs in powerful blasts of focused energy. As always, the unifying ingredient is Bellows’s distinctive baritone voice as he croons about existential dread, alienation, and hypocrisy – though offset with moments of levity and hopefulness. “Love and Kindness” is a reference to the ongoing war in Gaza while “Something To Lose” was inspired by the loss of Bellows’s beloved dog, Dragon. “That song is about the idea that maybe you’d rather never love anybody or anything because it’s just another thing to lose, and that really resonated with me at the time,” he says of the latter track.

“When you’re involved in the arts there’s some expectation for you to be smart or know stuff and I don’t want to be that poser anymore,” he explains. There’s a liberation in that lack of pretense—and even when Bellows is musing about his own limitations in “Near Me,” there’s a beauty in the imperfections: The subtle buzzing of the amp, the finger noise on the strings and Bellows’s voice rising above all of it in a way that’s distinctly Neva Dinova.