An evening full of ‘quietly jaw-dropping’ moments.
Great Lake Swimmers & Jente Pironet | YES Manchester | 9th May 2026
Reviewed by Peter Wild
We find ourselves in YES, a building that was once an auction house, to check out Great Lake Swimmers, a Canadian trio touring their ninth album, Caught Light.
But first, in support, Jente Pironet, the Belgian frontman of shimmery guitar pop band Portland – solo Pironet is a different kettle of fish. Dressed in black work trousers and a black vest, his swooping vocals and chiming guitar chords sound like no one so much as Jeff Buckley. It takes a lot of chutzpah to give your all in front of a relatively small crowd in a dank basement but Pironet does just that. In addition to stripped back versions of songs from Portland’s recent Champlain album, he also takes on Dylan (asking us if we think his mop of curly hair makes him look like the Duluth minstrel), knocking out a pretty distinct version of ‘Girl from the North Country’ (from The Freewheelin’…). All told, it’s the kind of support that makes you wonder if the main act could possibly live up to it.
Thankfully, Great Lake Swimmers are more than up to the task. Usually given to touring as a five-piece, the current live iteration of the band sees Gary Craig (drums) and Colleen Brown (keyboards and bass, among other things) join frontman Tony Dekker and it’s a gentle, organic affair – think Fakebook-period Yo La Tengo, early Sufjan Stevens or Deathcab for Cutie, particularly the acoustic version of their Asphalt Meadows album. They launch in with ‘Still’ from their 2009 album, Lost Channels, and what was true then remains true now: “I’m still tuning myself to the great key / I’m still mining for life in the dark wells / I’m still searching for whispers in-between yells / I’m still an arrow un-shot fixed in a bow…”
Their sound is primarily acoustic (although on record it’s fleshed out with steel pedal and strings) but never anything less than urgent. They follow ‘Still’ with three tracks from their new album, ‘One More Dance Around the Sun’, which could easily stand alongside anything by Fleet Foxes; ‘Wrong Wrong Wrong’, which opens “This is getting desperate / and we haven’t seen the worst of it…”; and ‘For You To Come Around’, which wouldn’t sound out of place on Neil Young’s Harvest Moon. There is a sense that Great Lake Swimmers operate ever so slightly out of time, a step away from fashion, and their songs could just as easily have been records in the 60s and early 70s as yesterday or earlier this week. Take the song ‘Everything Is Moving So Fast’, for instance, which they recorded as a sort of duet back in 2010, but which couldn’t feel more contemporary.
From 2010 we retreat further to ‘Where in the World Are You’ from 2007’s album, Ongiara, recorded in the Aeolian Hall in London, Ontario (Great Lake Swimmers having a bit of a thing for recording in odd places). It’s a beaut. They play ‘Caught Light’, the title track of the new record, ‘Somewhere Near Thunder Bay’ (from Dekker’s 2013 solo release, Prayer of the Woods) and ‘Your Rocky Spine’, the first bars of which prompt the stranger next to me to whisper in my ear, “This was the first Great Lake Swimmers song I ever heard. It’s why I’m here’. They are a band who have this effect.
There are plenty of other quietly jaw-dropping moments throughout the evening, from Dekker flying solo on ‘Imaginary Bars’ (from 2005’s Bodies and Minds) and ‘Talking in Your Sleep’ (another deep cut from his solo album), on which he sounds more like Nebraska-period Springsteen than at any other point in the evening, to the rousing singalong that joins ‘Pulling on a Line’, on which Dekker sounds not dissimilar to a young Loudon Wainright, the crowd joining him for “I’m just pulling on a line, a line”.
‘I wouldn’t recommend doing this for a living,’ he says at various points in the evening. You sense that he and the band maybe sometimes ask themselves if it’s worth it, making music as good as this for a lifetime of small rooms. (“What if I went supernova,” he sings on ‘Distant Star’, “If I really felt the heat”). But there’s a trajectory too, as the trio make their way through these quiet, majestic songs, and as they pick up on the obvious love in the room for what they are doing – maybe just maybe it’s worth it after all. (That ‘Distant Star’ lyric ends, “I would rather be in the distance / burning at my own speed.”)
They close the set with the very first song from the very first Great Lake Swimmers album, recorded when Dekker mostly performed on his own (albeit under what has become the band’s name), a good couple of decades ago now. “It’s a lullaby,” he tells us. The audience is rapt, like children who have no plan on going to sleep. ‘Moving Pictures, Silent Films’ he sings and we are all glad to have shared in what feels like a secret, hidden away in the basement of YES.
Reviewed by Peter Wild