Brendan Canning – 'Something For All Of Us' review
Warning: this album is not as it appears. First off, that there are 21 players credited on a “solo” album should ring alarm bells. Equally telling should be the use of the first person plural in its title. What shouldn’t surprise, however, is this is perceived as a solo album by Brendan Canning, a founder member of Broken Social Scene – a band who, at last count, had half of the Eastern seaboard of Canada on its payroll – and someone for whom it seems the only way to make music is to collaborate, collaborate and then collaborate some more with your collaborators’ collaborators. Twenty-one musicians? Pah – that’s barely a band at all.
That said, the album’s title is reasonably descriptive: as might be expected, the work of a score of musicians with disparate tastes called “Something for All of Us” really is just that: chugging college indie rock, p-funk, dub reggae, brassy drones, post-rock and small-hours breathy acoustica are all represented here somewhere or other by a variety of lead vocalists. Track by track, the album sounds like a game of musical consequences; as an album, it’s democracy in action, with all the positives and negatives that that entails.
The positives first: when the intersection is occasionally found in the imaginary Venn diagram of all the contributory genres, the results are gorgeous. Chameleon builds for four minutes like Mogwai with trumpets and barely audible vocals, allowing every buzz, click and drone its own breathing space before exploding into the kind of gorgeous, uplifting and straight-up rock song that Radiohead had down-pat in 1995. All The Best Wooden Toys Come From Germany is an equally great example of collaboration generating more the sum of its parts, and Possible Grenade, while ostensibly a slice of predictable indie-rock, has so much going on beneath the lead vocal – clearly the work of musicians who could take or leave chugging guitars – that it really should be included on the album twice in a row to save one’s rewind button getting worn out.
The negatives, however, largely occur when the diplomatic talks between contrasting performers appear to break down, or when the group seems to be working less toward an agreed goal and more towards appeasing a specific interest of one player. The most glaring example is Love Is New, a cowbell-driven dubby funk skank that might’ve once sounded good in the middle of a Clash LP but here, and now, feels faintly embarrassing and very out of place. The immediately following song, Antique Bull is equally misjudged, with a wispy female vocal taking the lead for the first time. The accompanying instrumentation mimics the slightly ticklish singing, and the result is a witless wheeze of a song that, next to Love is New, undermines the middle of the album terribly.
Broken Social Scene, and more broadly its label Arts & Crafts, have an admirable ideal of everybody contributing to everyone else’s work, and Something For All Of Us upholds that inclusive tradition better than a lot of its recent output. However, as is the failing with so many LPs of this ilk, the sound of collaboration can so quickly become that of compromise, and a few wiser, less democratically taken decisions at crucial points would’ve rendered this album great rather than just good.
7/10
