Plumbiferous Media

The Most Serene Repub­lic began its career in 2003 with two mem­bers, front­man Ryan Lenssen and singer Adrian Jew­ett. Six years later, it has seven mem­bers and has just released its third album under Arts & Crafts, …And the Ever Expand­ing Uni­verse. The Most Serene Repub­lic has focused over time on their shift­ing musi­cal pres­ence, and their newest album dis­plays quite a change from their ear­lier work, as well as a great deal of diver­sity within the album itself. How­ever, there is a sig­nif­i­cant amount of fluc­tu­a­tion as to which parts of this change do and don’t work - both ben­e­fit­ing and serv­ing as a detri­ment to …And the Ever Expand­ing Uni­verse.

Put sim­ply, the mem­bers of The Most Serene Repub­lic are quite tal­ented. The album begins (after the orches­tral intro­duc­tion) with a piano line play­ing heavy chords, light­ened by syn­co­pa­tion. The piano is then joined by pow­er­ful gui­tar chords accom­pa­nied by drums, all of which fit per­fectly into the cre­atively irreg­u­lar line. Later, after an extreme, lengthy crescendo, the track qui­ets back down to the same piano line, but on the next entrance Adrian Jewett’s voice joins the gui­tar and drums, mov­ing the track in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent direc­tion. The same piano line takes over a third time around the 2:30 mark, this time altered by a higher synth line, and the track trans­forms in a third, com­pletely unique man­ner. The band also seems to be able to dig itself out of holes. Even though the tam­bour of the drums in “Cathar­sis Boo” is gen­er­ally hol­low and dull, the incred­i­bly inter­est­ing drum part more than makes up for the odd sound, to the point where it mixes quite well with the rest of the track.

The largest prob­lem then with …And the Ever Expand­ing Uni­verse is not located in any spe­cific ele­ment of the album but in the inter­min­gling of all the ele­ments. Nat­u­rally, it is easy to take issue with cer­tain tracks, such as the excel­lently titled “No One Likes a Nihilist,” with its incred­i­bly abrupt tran­si­tions, “Ves­sels of a Donor Look” and “Four Humours,” both of which main­tain excep­tion­ally bright chords (on a very major album) through­out their entireties, or “All of One Is the Other,” which barely plods along. How­ever, where the album most often suf­fers is in the amor­phous com­bi­na­tion of large num­bers of voices car­ry­ing con­trary lines, includ­ing most of the louder sec­tions of “Bub­ble Rep­u­ta­tion,” most of “Heav­ens to Pur­ga­tory,” and every­thing after the four minute mark of the lengthy “Pat­ter­nic­ity.” These messier sec­tions dimin­ish the tech­ni­cal prowess of the album to such a great extent that one even begins to wish that the band had made a rule of never com­bin­ing more than three voices at any one time.

Adrian Jew­ett and Emma Ditch­burn share vocal duties in The Most Serene Repub­lic, and it’s obvi­ous that, through­out …And the Ever Expand­ing Uni­verse, they’re striv­ing for the right bal­ance and inter­play between their two voices. How­ever, they never quite reach that point. Jewett’s solo sec­tions are much bet­ter - at his best he dis­plays an intrigu­ing level of nuance, though at his worst he suf­fers from a severe lack of vocal vari­a­tion - even in some of his most inflected sec­tions, the pat­tern of inflec­tion is repeated and quite pre­dictable. Occa­sion­ally, one of the two will reach a more inter­est­ing level of cre­ativ­ity, such as Jewett’s more inter­est­ing work on the open­ing track, “Bub­ble Rep­u­ta­tion,” but these occa­sions stand in clear con­trast to the rest of the album. Mix­ing deci­sions which leave the instru­men­tal cloud much more promi­nent than any of the vocals com­pound these issues, leav­ing the mediocre vocals buried under sev­eral lay­ers of sound.

Though many of the lyrics of …And the Ever Expand­ing Uni­verse are obscured by the muted nature of the vocals, those which break through are gen­er­ally well-considered and fit rhyth­mi­cally to the music. Jewett’s sur­re­ally intrigu­ing line on “Bub­ble Rep­u­ta­tion”: “Damn you Sol I said to / Quit your knock / On my door with the pass­ing of time,” demon­strates not only the band’s abil­ity to write inter­est­ing lyrics but Jewett’s skilled use of enjamb­ment to com­ple­ment and fur­ther develop the irreg­u­lar rhythm of the track. Later lyrics such as “No One Likes a Nihilist“‘s “Quid pro quo fleet­ing” demon­strate the band’s love for lyrics with extremely fluid mean­ing. This imbues the com­po­nent parts of each track with a poetic ambiance but at the same time can leave the tracks some­what con­fus­ing overall.

In the end, …And the Ever Expand­ing Uni­verse, is an album intri­cate at its best and messy at its worst. The band cer­tainly knows how to both com­pose and play inter­est­ing, unex­pected, and pow­er­ful lines, but the band too often relies on den­sity, rather than detail. In The Most Serene Republic’s bio, the band writes of mov­ing towards the “ebbs and flows that make you wanna live.” And while …And the Ever Expand­ing Uni­verse cer­tainly fol­lows this mind­set lit­er­ally, with upbeat, loud sec­tions paired with much lighter sec­tions, they often, among sta­tic slow sec­tions, abrupt tran­si­tions, and shape­less denser sec­tions, seem to lose sight of what they claim to be their orig­i­nal pur­pose for ebbing and flow­ing: avoid­ing stagnancy.

This post is tagged 40-49, The Most Serene Republic