By: Marc Z. Grub

Unsurprisingly, Brendan Canning Something For All of Us feels like the older brother album of bandmate Kevin Drew’s Spirit If… which came out last year. Both albums share musicians, influences and sensibilities, but while Spirit If… was longer and had a great teenage-hippie-epic feel to it, Something For… is shorter, and feels just a little more intelligent and mature. That’s not to say that it’s not beautiful and exciting in the same ways as it’s predecessor (it is), but the star of the show has clearly changed, though the cast and crew remain the same.

Many of the songs on Something For… feel like Broken Social Scene songs scaled down and made poppier. The grandiose wave of sound that defines Broken Social Scene seems to mainly be the product of Kevin Drew and producer Dave Newfeld, as the reverb is mostly absent for Brendan Canning’s effort and the sound is more compact, though no less intense. Other notable BSS attributes such as superb instrumentation (which often crosses over into orchestration), creative rhythms and euphoric melodies and production, remain. Most impressive is that despite contributing very few songs and vocals to BSS’s albums, every song on Something For… is wonderfully constructed with fantastic melodies and sharp lyrics that, unlike Kevin Drew’s most of the time, actually seem to contain meaning.

Songs like “Hit The Wall” and the title track hit with the same force that “Backed Out On the…” and “Lucky Ones” had on Spirit If…, only they’re more complex. “Churches Under Stairs” is great and contains some vocal lines that apparently they couldn’t get Feist to sing; Canning does a great falsetto imitation of the chanteuse. “Chameleon”, “All the Best Wooden Toys Come From Germany” and the heart-rendering “Been at it So Long”, hearken back to the lazy ambiance of the first BSS album and the pre-BSS “KC Accidental”. The album is amazingly consistent with every single song matching the quality of the one preceding it while never sounding redundant.

Though, some may be impatient for BSS to quit with this “Presents” thing and make another band album, the quality and frequency of the work has more than tided over this reviewer. Kevin Drew’s effort only further confirmed that he’s one of Toronto’s finest songwriters. Canning’s album was truly necessary, because it proves that he can undoubtedly write just as brilliantly as his bandmate. Hopefully, when BSS do decide to make another album all together, Canning will be have even more of that “something” for all of us.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 6:29 pm.