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I’ve gotten into the habit of not expecting much when it comes to the followups of brilliant records—great albums are too much an amalgam of the days and emotion that went into them to be reproduced years later. So often, we get something that sounds like the hollow husk of a formerly great band. It’s like the followup album is some sort of sieve through which only the best bands pass—the bands who can deal with the pressure and retain the creativity they had when they were still hungry.

So Broken Social Scene is at that fork, where the flukes and the one-offs diverge from the greatest of artists. And it’s October, Two-Thousand and Goddamned Five, a long three years since You Forgot It in People. And the label they started, Arts & Crafts, has grown—releasing a dozen records by other bands in the meantime. And they record their albums in little chunks, without the whole band together, trusting their producer to stitch everything together. And they tour, and tour, and tour, in diverse configurations that can only be enumerated by exponentiation. So the pressure is on. Do they deliver? Yeah, pretty much.

More about that producer: part of what made that last album so great was Dave Newfeld, at the helm of his Stars and Sons studio—little things like the high-hat swerving left and then right, or the dominanting bass lines and clever instrumentation. It had a sexual, adolescent sound we hadn’t heard before, something unique for BSS that we identified with. It was insecure, like us. Three years of rockstardom later, the band is self-assured, and Newf’s production has changed to match. It’s noisy and loud, boisterous and fun. It sounds unmixed and clipped—glitchy, overcompressed, and more multitracked than anything I’ve ever heard. It’s a new style entirely: let’s call it popcrunk. It takes a little time to get used to, but it’s just what BSS needed.

As songwriting goes, this is pop music, and it doesn’t stray much from what BSS has thrown down in the past. I’d say that the first seven tracks are perfectly written, executed, and sequenced, but it slows down from there. “Handjobs for the Holidays” (perhaps second only to “I’m Still Your Fag” as titles go) is mostly unmemorable, with the sort of sloshy rhythm section cues that are practically BSS clichés. “Hotel” is saved by a Deadringer-style horn line and a sexy drawl reminiscent of Apostle of Hustle’s “Gleaning”, but is otherwise unremarkable. In fact, the whole disc sounds a lot more like those Cuban Apostles. That’s not always a bad thing, but Folkloric Feel sure wasn’t a BSS record. Audioscrobbler says I’ve listened to this album about 30 times so far, but I still can’t remember what “Bandwitch” sounds like. A lot of it just blurs together, and you can see why they were originally going to call this record Windsurfing Nation. It just kind of glides by. That, and the whole John Kerry thing.

On the other hand, the first half really is brilliant, and you can rightfully give Special Mention to “Superconnected”. Then there’s the album-ending “It’s All Gonna Break”, which has also been ending BSS shows for a while now, and with good reason. Let’s break this down SAT style:

  popcrunk : "It's All Gonna Break" ::
  dancepunk : "Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard"

That is, it’s all things to all people, and so endlessly triumphant, you have to conclude that BSS is not just back in the game—BSS is the game. Unfortunately, it’s not all hits, and a lot of it just feels like a followup album—it’s music for the comedown. A sweet, tender comedown it is, but my immediate reaction after listening to this record the first time was to just put on You Forgot It in People again.

update email haters, I didn’t mean to come off so negative. This is the best album I’ve heard in 2005. More to be posted soon… #

Note to self: attend a Prop. 73 rally with a sign that reads YES ON PREFUSE 73. #

There’s still a lot more work to do (uh, basically everything except this page), but this is the new look.

My favorite part is the little spanning calendar things on the right. I’ve completely turned off the grey bars in IE, because its rendering is so unreliable. But Mozilla and Safari users should enjoy the good times.

I wish the template tags in WordPress all had the boolean to return a string instead of echo—it would be much easier. You have the option of skipping them altogether and just using the $post object, but then you don’t get fancy text-processing that way. To work around this, I ended up writing some filter plugins (for example, the new permalinks).

More to come… #

Sylvia was sitting at a folding table on the West side of fashionable Abbott Kinney Blvd. on Saturday morning, where all the new couples were out shopping for fashionable things. By the looks of it, she was about 120. I was walking by, turkey-cranberry sandwich in hand, tired from walking most of Venice in search of a surf shop. She asked me if I had registered to vote.

Now, out-of-state college students have a programmed response for this sort of thing—“Sorry, I’m not a California resident”—but that’s not true any more, so I sat down and let her fill out the form for me. K as in, shit, what starts with K? A, M as in Mary, P as in Peter… it’s funny how I picked up Mary and Peter from listening to my Mom spell out our name on the phone. I certainly didn’t pick them up at bible study.

We talked about the New York Times, and how much better it is than some other papers. I was going to launch into a rant about the whole Times Select thing, but I stopped when I realized that she has probably never used the internet. Newspapers are a subtly different thing for my generation.

I told her to have a nice day, and I meant it. She frowned at me. “Don’t tell me to have a nice day,” she said. “Nobody means it when they say it. Say ‘take care’ instead. I’ve trained all of Brooklyn, the bus drivers… I take the bus everywhere—people on the street, everyone. Take care.” #