Tony Dekker knows how to whisper a secret into your ear. As crickets softly buzz on the opening track to the Great Lake Swimmers’ debut, Dekker gently sings with a rustic voice, “Wake me up when this over” before he proceeds to break your heart with a compelling and refreshing acoustic oriented song. The Toronto-based Dekker strums and plucks his six strings while piano keys delicately add background eloquence to a composition breathing the biological imprint of a rural tragedy. His haunting vocals intimately add the lines, “I’ve been under the ground/Eating prayers from this old book I found” and “The truth was unbearable” with such sincerity that it tears your emotions apart and throws them against a wall. However, this heartfelt intimacy leaves you longing for more rather than wallowing in past pains, and the other nine tracks also offer all the spine-chilling melancholy one needs to watch the country hills swallow the sun. With pedal steel and accordion sprinkled throughout the songs, Great Lake Swimmers create a stunning sound of warm misery. The album was recorded in an abandoned grain silo in Southern Ontario and captures a frail folk current that is both lovely and thorny. “The Man With No Skin” is a slow and mournful dirge detailing the poignant isolation one human being can become bogged down by; “The Animals of the World” finds Dekker’s voice tenderly floating like a feather behind his acoustic guitar eeriness and the slow-burning beauty of “Great Lake Swimmers” wrings maximum emotion from minimum instrumentation. The secrets that Tony Dekker shares are quiet observations that many of us are too shy to admit or even acknowledge. He and his band, the Great Lake Swimmers, have created a record of low volume loveliness that is rich in detail and destined to become a classic exploration of human frailty and folly. Harry Smith would proudly place this collection of songs in his archives. – Michael McLeod