One of the worst things about tongue-in-cheek modern life is that great menu items are allowed to have awful names. Has anybody ever said "Bartender, make me a 'sex on the beach'" without wincing? Can anyone order "Fajitas con sizzle" without wanting to slide under the table in defeat? Have you ever actually made it all the way through "I'll have a 'Rooty tooty fresh and fruity breakfast'" without wanting to stab your eyes out?
Unfortunately for music enthusiasts, embarrassing names don't stop at breakfast menus. Sure, "Bang A Gong" is a great song, but would you ever say that you love T.Rex? Fans of Broken Social Scene have a similar problem. You love their atmospheric orchestral arrangements, but who can rationalize liking a band whose name sounds like a whiny blogger complaining about a Friday night at Tufts?
With their latest release, the unfortunately eponymous "Broken Social Scene," the band makes it harder for us not to want to talk about them. The album, the group's third, takes their approach, which was a little scattershot in 2003's "You Forgot It In People," and focuses it toward the more aggressive, driving sound we heard in songs like "Almost Crimes."
Other bands like The Libertines and Weezer have tried the trick of self-titling a follow-up album with varying degrees of success. In this case, it makes a little more sense; while not a complete reinvention of the band's sound, "Broken Social Scene" marks a definite step in a new direction.
One of the most interesting things about "You Forgot It In People" was that it used a variety of musical styles, from clappy dance beats to almost a cappella vocal loops, to convey a longing, lovesick tone. The production helped out by making the band's considerable array of symphonic instruments sound sort of electronic - if your vacuum cleaner fell in love with the toaster, this is what its tribute album would sound like.
"Broken Social Scene" conserves the same robots-in-love production mentality, but flips the rest of the formula. Here, the unity of intense and more percussion-driven songs allows the band to play on different themes; there's the beach party atmosphere of "Windsurfing Nation," the junior prom wooing of "Major Label Debut," the "sex you up" smoothness of "Hotel," and so on.
The bombastic approach of the album is immediately evident. The first song, "Our Faces Split the Coast in Half," is a messy melnge of cymbals, bass, bells and deeply buried vocals that sounds like an orchestra tuning up; it prepares the listener for the dynamism of the rest of the album.
The track takes a few other quirky risks that pay off: a tapping that sounds like a secretary drumming her acrylic nails on her desk, some brass flourishes that would be at home in the theme song of a late night public access show, ocean wave-y cymbals crashing. Somehow the large scale of the symphony-tripping-over-itself effect of the beginning and the starkness of the middle few bars of a single drum set fit together, creating an eclectic but unified mix that anticipates the rest of the album.
Other songs on the album take Broken Social Scene's past work and modify it for their new, sensitive-poet-with-an-edge mindset. "Swimmers" updates "Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl;" instead of the haunting girl's voice begging us to "park that car / drop that phone / sleep on the floor / dream about me," she's now saucily hitting on the pool lifeguard.
Likewise, "Handjobs For The Holidays" (Broken Social Scene doesn't want us to be able to comfortably mention their songs' names, either), updates the not-so-subtle innuendo of "Lover's Spit." Despite the overtness of its name, "Handjobs" actually has innocent lyrics; one can easily imagine an awkward 15-year-old trying out the line "let me take you home / we'll get high just a little." The song's ebbing and flowing ethereal guitar work and breathy "ooh"s create a wholesomeness that helps to overcome the crass song title.
If anything can be criticized about "Broken Social Scene," it's that the album occasionally triggers reminders of other songs and bands. "Hotel"'s amorous whisper-singing is a little too much like Prince; the beat of "Windsurfing Nation" is a bit too close to "My Sharona" for comfort; and "Ibi Dreams Of Pavement (A Better Half)" offers a double feature of contemporary artists - it sounds like The Walkmen's Hamilton Leithauser covering the Arcade Fire's "Wake Up."
Luckily, these moments of musical deja vu are few and fleeting, since the album moves quickly and leaves any stragglers behind. "Broken Social Scene" raises a lot of questions, such as "Is Ibi dreaming of pavement or Pavement?" or "Is that a helicopter?!?" But before you have time to answer them, you're already distracted by the next unlikely trick that somehow works.
It's this tendency toward the unexpected that makes all seven minutes of "Bandwitch" as interesting as the 86 seconds of "Finish Your Collapse And Stay For Breakfast," and makes us anxiously await the band's next (hopefully not self-titled) work.
