[review 2005: the honourable mentions]

Broken Social Scene is this year’s Blueberry Boat for me: an album so imposing and impenetrable that every listen is hard work, trying to discover exactly where the good bits are and wondering if you aren’t being played for a fool. Broken Social Scene weren’t really facing a sophomore slump when they recorded this self-titled album—after all, You Forgot It In People was their second album—but that’s the folly of having a breakthrough album; you get to go through the terrible twos all over again. I’ve never been as much of a fan of Broken Social Scene’s freeform jam tendencies, and my favourite songs of their have always been the ones that sounded like songs. If that makes me a traditionalist, so be it. The entire second half of You Forgot It In People is less memorable, though it has its moments; think of Broken Social Scene as the second half, blown up to a full album and reconstituted until it’s practically unrecognizable save for the stubborn inability to form coherent songs.

There’s so much baggage that comes with Broken Social Scene these days that it’s hard to figure out which parts of the album I don’t like because of said baggage, and which parts I genuinely don’t like. Take “Swimmers,” for example. It actually starts at the tail end of the preceding track, “Windsurfing Nation,” with Emily Haines and a canned drum beat giving us a false intro. Maybe it’s supposed to be cute, or maybe it’s supposed to be a signifier of the intentionally scattered and spontaneous recording process. All I know is it’s annoying. Broken Social Scene should do well enough on its own without having to ride the coattails of its three female vocalists, and as a symbol of spontaneity it feels far too self-conscious and planned to be convincing. But the rest of the song is pretty good, even though Haines isn’t buried under a sea of vocal effects like on her previous showcase, “Anthems For A Seventeen-Year-Old Girl.” It’s the sort of effortless dream pop promised by the album’s original title, Windsurfing Nation.

There are plenty of good spots on the album as well. The first single, “Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day),” is a gloriously noisy stomper of a track, and is exactly the sort of thing Broken Social Scene should be recording more of. It sounds like a real full band effort, and with a loose collective nearing double digits in number, Broken Social Scene’s full band sound blows away everyone else’s full band sound. “7/4 (Shoreline)” is another highlight; time has made it clear that Leslie Feist does just as good a job of this song as Amy Millan did, if not better, and the noisier production of the studio track (versus the Zed recording from a couple of years back) finally works. It just took a couple of months to get used to it.

That’s the central problem—and the streak of hope—with Broken Social Scene. On the one hand, the album as it stands right now doesn’t really do it for me. I get that it’s a much grander vision than You Forgot It In People, the sound of a band more confortable with its expanded scope. It’s impossible not to applaud the majestic record the band finally delivered after two years of haphazard recording sessions. But I also hear songs like “Finish Your Collapse and Stay For Breakfast,” which are maddening because they’re so incomplete, inconsequential and utterly useless. And then there are songs that display flashes of brilliance and nothing more, like “Windsurfing Nation” and “Hotel.” But on the other hand, I used to hate the final version of “7/4,” and now I think it’s great. Is it simply that I have to give the album more time to sink in, to let it do its magic?

But in the meantime, every listen is like work. If I don’t keep it firmly in my field of attention, it dissolves into a series of unfocused noises and melodies. And at the end of the day, there are albums that reward my attentions more immediately and to greater satisfaction.