[review 2007: honourable mentions]

If you bought The Shapes We Make, you probably already know that you’re part of a small but devoted group of Mary Timony fans. You probably remember Helium, remember The Dirt of Luck, remember the too-long-by-half fallow period between Helium’s breakup and Timony’s first solo album. You made it through Timony’s ren-faire period, and maybe even liked it very much. And then, two years ago, you heard a Mary Timony album that made you stand up and take notice: Ex Hex is Timony’s best solo outing to date, tossing a lot of the medieval-music trappings and charging ahead with the hardest guitar riffs of her career and the amps turned up to eleven. Of course, once you’ve made the breakthrough album (in a career littered with left turns and breakthroughs), what do you do for an encore?

In Timony’s case, you form another band. She’s always had other people play on her albums, but for The Shapes We Make the Boston-by-way-of-D.C. indie rocker felt the contributions of her backing band were important enough to warrant giving them full credit for the album’s sound. The Shapes We Make does sound more like the product of a full band than Ex Hex, but that could be just as much an intentional shift away from Mary Timony as rock star; the new album is the more mild-mannered sibling to Ex Hex’s guitar hero acrobatics and attitude. It’s not as euphoric an album, and there’s a greater tendency towards vaguely proggy guitar jams. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as Timony’s quite good at finding a balance between too straightforward and too wankish (”Curious Minds” is a really good example), but it does mean Timony’s new album occupies a slightly different, less immediate headspace.

The most direct songs tend to be the most successful initially, with “Sharpshooter” and “Summer’s Fawn” galloping along at a decent clip. “Pause/Off” contains some very obvious political jabs at a time when most artists are content to make veiled references to the war and the Bush administration. It’s hard to mistake the intent of “Get your laws off my body, mister / pause/off, Supreme Court misters / don’t mess around with me and my sisters.” This is especially notable considering Timony’s own tendencies in the past to use old-tyme settings and characters in favour of more contemporary references; it’s a lot easier to use “Pause/Off” as a rallying cry than, say, “Musik and Charming Melodee.”

Occasionally the album dips into overly ponderous territory; “Window” and “Pink Clouds” are pleasant but not particularly interesting, and they occur late in the album, which is just when Ex Hex was finding a second wind. But the real issue doesn’t necessarily lie with the album as a piece of music, but rather as a historical artifact. Over a decade into her career, Timony’s still working her own particular groove. Many interviews have focused on her unwillingness to adapt to the changing winds of “indie rock,” and it’s quite true—by virtue of catering to her own whims, which actually haven’t changed too drastically over the years even with the medieval obsessions, Timony has unintentionally cast herself as a maverick in opposition to the increasingly corporate indie rock scene. But her stalwart independence has its price: The Shapes We Make, though it doesn’t sound particularly dated or old, is unlikely to win many new converts because this album shares much the same spirit with albums she made in the late 90s, and a lot of people have moved on.

So, if you’re a fan of The Shapes We Make—and I definitely am—what does this all mean, exactly? Is Timony a cult figure whose appeal lies partially in our nostalgia for when “indie rock” wasn’t such a meaningless term? Does she have anything genuinely new to bring to the table, or is she just extremely good at refining the same basic sound from her Helium days? Why am I even asking these questions of Timony when I might not necessarily ask them of, say, Yo La Tengo or Sonic Youth or any of a hundred other bands that have survived from the last decade? And finally, just because I’m self-indulgent at the best of times: does liking this album mean I’m getting old?

[review 2007: honourable mentions]

Sometimes you’ll read the reviews for an album and wonder if maybe you should’ve gotten that PhD in media studies or comparative literature, because the level of discourse seems to be several fathoms over your head. Friend Opportunity is one of those albums where every review makes you feel like a dolt. Forward-thinking? “They’re ‘deconstructing pop,’ which means they’re asking questions,” says Pitchfork of the album’s final track. “Part of what’s been endearing about this less caustic phase of the band is the loosely conceptual feel of their records,” says Tiny Mix Tapes. And then there’s the late, lamented Stylus with a reviewer who’s obviously thought very, very hard about what Deerhoof is: “There’s a self-involvement to their songs, a refusal to communicate beyond itself, that drives detractors to call the band ‘nihilistic.’”

Clearly Deerhoof are up to something far more interesting than just putting together fractured and frenetic pop albums, but if you’ve come to me to make heads or tails of Deerhoof’s grand vision you’re asking the wrong person. I barely pay attention to the lyrics; I can’t tell you if there’s a grand narrative weaving through the album, or if “The Perfect Me” is “trying really hard to be a pop song,” as the Stylus review indicates. I can’t place Deerhoof into the constellation of indie prog or avant-garde pop bands, or really any context at all. All I have is this album and this infernal brain of mine, ill-suited to drawing such complex connections.

If you’re looking for the Fisher-Price “shiny glowy things are shiny” review, though, welcome! Have a seat and let me tell you about Friend Opportunity, which on the scale of “not shiny” to “very shiny,” is a definite “wow that’s really shiny.” When I bought the album, I was basically hoping for an album full of the elements that made first track “The Perfect Me” such a killer song: namely the sound of 10,000 galloping out-of-control racehorses led by an evil organist mastermind with a giant purple cape and a twirly moustache. Packed with vitamins and explosions, “The Perfect Me” is one of the best pop songs of the year almost by sheer force of will—it packs more exciting twists, turns and switchbacks into three minutes than entire albums did this year.

Deerhoof can’t sustain the energy across the entire album, but the same otherworldly atmosphere and fragmented songwriting remains over the next eight tracks. “+81″ and “Believe E.S.P.” are the most conventional songs on the album, though there’s plenty of amusing meanders and tangents to follow even so. It’s also on the first couple of tracks that helium angel slash vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki’s unique singing style bears the most fruit, serving as counterpoint to the muscular and frenetic instrumental work—especially the insistent drum work of Greg Saunier. Whether Matsuzaki has the presence to carry “Whiter the Invisible Birds?”, though, I’m still not entirely sure.

Friend Opportunity is largely an appealing set of sounds and hooks that occasionally cohere into great songs. And even when those hooks don’t come together as maybe they should (like “Kids Are So Small,” a song held together mainly by the insistent repetition of the oh-so-quotable “if I were a man and you were dog, I’d throw stick for you”) the sounds are so happy shiny awesome that you shorten your attention span to compensate, so that every measure is like opening another box of Cracker Jacks and finding a brand new toy. Unfortunately it all falls apart on the last track, “Look Away,” which by all accounts is a sort of throwback to the more experimental side of Deerhoof that I’m not familiar with myself. This would be okay except that the song takes up a full third of the album’s 36-minute running time. As a result, Friend Opportunity leaves less of a lasting impression by virtue of losing a big chunk to distracted, directionless noodling. Pretend the album is a 24-minute EP instead, though, and you’ve got the aural equivalent of a kid’s ballpit: full of bright colours and fun noises.

[review 2007: honourable mentions]

For the Weakerthans it’s been a relatively straightforward progression since Left and Leaving. Reconstruction Site was the band’s first album for Epitaph, and probably the album with the widest appeal to date. The punkish guitar pop sound found itself with a little less punk and a little more pop, and the shift to character studies as lyrical subject material meant more people could relate in some way to the songs.

But for those of us who felt in their bones the desire to play on the baggage carousel or tape notes to the heavy machines like “we hope they treat you well, hope you don’t work too hard” (which, by the way, I always hoped were messages not to the operators of the machines, but to the machines themselves), Reconstruction Site was a bit of a letdown. Sure, the story of Michel Foucault and an Antarctica explorer having dinner was really funny and endearing (though the ill-advised country detour on “A New Name For Everything” balances that out), but it didn’t make up for the sense that John K. Samson was no longer really talking just to you, or about how you felt inside. Maybe this is why the Weakerthans were so popular with college crowds: they had just the right balance of literary compulsion and emotional sensitivity.

Where does Reunion Tour leave us, then? Seven years after Left and Leaving and ten after Fallow, it’d be foolish to imagine Samson would go back to writing about teenage flights of fancy or college-age heartbreak. Instead, the band adds to its catalogue of odes to Canadiana like hockey (”Elegy for Gump Worsley”), Winnipeg transit (”Civil Twilight”) and curling (”Tournament of Hearts,” a title that American commentators almost universally missed was a reference to the Canadian women’s curling championships). In that sense the Weakerthans are becoming ever so slightly like the Tragically Hip. But then the Tragically Hip never wrote a song about curling, as far as I remember. For that the Weakerthans have my everlasting gratitude (and apparently Canadian curling’s everlasting gratitude as well, if you read interviews with the band).

But gratitude doesn’t necessarily translate into love. Thankfully, Reunion Tour is an easier album to love than Reconstruction Site was. Though the Weakerthans’ sound is even tamer this time around, now just a glossier form of punk-inflected indie rock that won’t offend anyone by being too loud or too unpredictable, the band still knows the fine art of good songwriting, and there’s never a track that’s anything less than pleasant. At its best, like on “Civil Twilight” and “Tournament of Hearts,” Reunion Tour is still full of good singalongs and earworms.

If there’s a problem with the album, it’s that it’s not and never can be Left and Leaving. There’s no “My Favourite Chords,” no “Watermark,” no “Everything Must Go!” And perhaps the Weakerthans are a bit too complacent for comfort’s sake; one wonders how much longer they can stretch out their current modus operandi without making major changes to the formula. But for now, Reunion Tour will keep the Weakerthans in my good graces and even improve their standing a notch or two.

[review 2007: honourable mentions]

It all comes down to this: as much as I want to like In Our Bedroom After the War, it’s just not the album I was hoping it would be. That doesn’t make it bad at all, and actually there are a lot of good songs on the album. But if you’re hoping for a record that outdoes Set Yourself on Fire, keep looking.

Maybe that’s unfair to Stars, who’ve recorded an album that, like all their previous albums, takes a subtly different approach. Set Yourself on Fire was the Montreal band’s boldest and brightest statement to date. The one-two punch of “Your Ex-Lover is Dead” and the title track sounded grander and more luscious than everything off Heart, itself a more luxurious album than the almost-forgotten Nightsongs, and that trend continued throughout the album. By contrast, In Our Bedroom After the War reins things in a bit, choosing a more intimate and scaled-back approach.

I always imagined Stars as the musical equivalent of brash, foolhardy romantic proclamations, and I’ll point to “Soft Revolution” and the opening of “What the Snowman Learned About Love” (”Hi, I’m Amy, and this is my heart.”) as ample evidence that at one point in their career, they might’ve agreed. Even the way Torq sang and acted in concert had that stoic, damn-the-torpedoes attitude, like the band was going to war to fight for your freedom to love. Like so many movies set after wars, In Our Bedroom After the War is introspective, and though there’s no reason to suggest Stars can’t pull this off, it’s also not exactly their strong suit.

So we get intensely personal ballads like “Barricades,” where Torq reveals a hitherto unheard crooner side, and fit-for-AM-radio pop songs like “My Favourite Book” and “The Ghost of Genova Heights.” All these songs are excellent in their own right, once you remember that this album is not Set Yourself on Fire and was never intended to be. Where the new album begins to fall apart is in the last couple of tracks; “Life 2: The Unhappy Ending” only has the chorus to recommend it, and “Today Will Be Better, I Swear!” has even less. The album closes with the title track, which is almost entirely forgettable.

The real problem is that besides “Personal” and “Barricade,” it doesn’t feel like Stars has taken a whole lot of risks here. “My Favourite Book” is still one of my favourite tracks off the album, but I have to admit it’s not exactly groundbreaking material for the band. And the reason why “Personal” and “Barricade” feel like risks is because they run in the opposite direction from everything on Stars’ last album. They’re utterly naked songs, with no studio wizardry, lavish instrumentation or even much in the way of quirky lyricism to hide the emotional payload. By comparison the rest of the album feels a bit too easy, a bit too much like they’ve been there and done it before.

And that’s why I keep bringing up Set Yourself on Fire: In Our Bedroom After the War just hasn’t move far enough away from that blueprint to leave the inevitable comparisons behind, and so it will always live in the shadow of its bigger brother. (Or sister. I don’t know how you classify the gender of an album.) Forget Set Yourself on Fire exists and you have a very good Stars album, with a number of pleasant-sounding tunes like “Window Bird” and the aforementioned “My Favourite Book.” Concentrate on the differences between the two albums and you’ll still find plenty to like—besides “Personal” and “Barricade” there’s the odd falsetto-laced “The Ghost of Genova Heights.” And even when the album does take up motifs from its predecessor, like “Bitches in Tokyo” does “Ageless Beauty,” it occasionally hits its mark. So there’s plenty to like about In Our Bedroom After the War in the end. But…

[review 2007: odds and ends]

Sometimes you can write entire screeds about an album. And sometimes you can barely write a sentence. For whatever reason, here’s some of the albums this year that had me fresh out of new perspectives.

Joel Plaskett Emergency – Ashtray Rock. Plaskett applies his many talents to a concept that’s obviously close to his heart (though apparently fictional): two East Coast teenagers in a band, ripped apart by their competing affections for a girl. Unfortunately, meeting the needs of the narrative requires Plaskett to up the filler quotient, but “Fashionable People” and the accompanying video are damned near irresistible, “Face of the Earth” and “Nothing More to Say” are deliciously melodramatic, and “The Instrumental” is surprisingly satisfying for an interstitial. If the album had a couple more of Plaskett’s trademark rockers it’d be an even better album.

[review 2007: odds and ends]

Sometimes you can write entire screeds about an album. And sometimes you can barely write a sentence. For whatever reason, here’s some of the albums this year that had me fresh out of new perspectives.

C.O.C.O. – Play Drums + Bass. Olivia Ness and Chris Sutton record another set of minimalist indie funk standards that have you marvel at how much Ness has grown as a singer—and how little the band’s ambitions have grown in the same period. But maybe there’s just not that much you can do with a bass guitar and drums, and C.O.C.O. are already pushing the envelope as far as it will go. Or maybe they’re not evolving much because the new album is still groovetastic, even if it’s not that dissimilar from their last CD.