“O Canada, My Home and Native Band”
“Canadian Baroque indie pop orchestra with string and brass sections and male/female vocals” seems like a niche that’s specific enough to exclude all but a paltry handful of like-minded groups. But when you really sit and think about it, such bands just are about as common as two piece blues rock duos in America; you can take your pick of Arcade Fire, The New Pornographers, Broken Social Scene, and dozens of others. The Canadian market is flooded with quirk-fueled grandiosity and bearded guys wearing vests playing lutes and glockenspiels. When you consider the fact that all these bands usually have a live incarnation that include six or more people, mathematically that means indie rock bands encompass, like, half the country’s population. Against all odds, South Ontario’s The Most Serene Republic manage to stand out from the crowd by sounding like a six-piece version of Bert The Chimney Sweep’s one-man band on Mediac, their latest album; a little more ragtag and less neoclassical than their peers.
Opener “Love Loves to Love Love” starts out sparse, but quickly turns descends into a slow wade through a dense thicket of electronic drums and guitars and garish keyboards all bouncing indiscriminately off of each other, with only a fat bassline to anchor the entropy. It comes together like a ragged New Orleans funeral march, especially when the banjos kick in during “Failure of Anger.” Most Serene Republic create particularly coniferous, folky moments with several instances of Frightened Rabbit-like layered sing-yelling. But when they opt to ditch the baroque trappings for moments at a time, the groups sound like a less robotic, more organic MGMT. “I Haven’t Seen You Around” stirs in clean guitars, dreamy organs, and a generous dose of claps to cook up some radio ready power pop, while highlight “Ontario Morning” fuses woodwind fanfare with punchy indie pop hi-hat skittering to result in what might happen if Foster The People are ever hired to score a mountaineering documentary. The grand reach and arrangement of it all is ever so slightly reminiscent of Sufjan Stevens’ landmark Illinoise, with a delicate touch of latter day, pop-oriented, non-prog rock Decemberists. “Benefit of the Doubt” is caught somewhere between The Police, 60s psychedelia and elevator music, and the band experiments with song structure more than their sunny instrumental palette initially indicates, pulling some tricky time signatures out of their hats on both “Fingerspelling” and closer “The Feels.”
A stark contrast from the curated, refined elegance of an album like Arcade Fire’s Funeral, the first half of Mediac is frantic and hyperactive, not to mention sonically cramped. The Most Serene Republic address this issue by slamming on the brakes when the bus arrives at “Nation of Beds,” which starts out sounding like Sigur Ros thanks to the lead singer’s breathy, cracked falsetto.
By this point in the album, The Most Serene Republic’s flaws have all revealed themselves. The vocal style has started to grate a bit. The non-rock instruments prove to be unnecessary trappings about half of the time, which is a poor enough ratio to frame all the bells and whistles as gimmicky. However, this problem would be a less forgivable sin if this band wasn’t any fun. There are always distractingly catchy basslines and plenty of stompy auxilliary percussion to get you through the tough times, and the group’s unorthodox choice of instruments will at least give you the rare pleasure of asking yourself “What the fuck is going on here?” every once in a while when violas and a French horn fly at you out of left field.
Most importantly, TMSR keep it light where other bands get all dreary and fucking boring, collapsing under the inundating weight of their own pretention. You can’t fault the Republic for lack of enthusiasm either; during “Failure of Anger” the group comes together to chant “Get excited about this!” I mean, if you guys insist.
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