he first time I ever heard about Mass Romantic was in December 2001, when Amazon put it at number 11 on their year end list. They didn’t really talk about how it sounded in the blurb, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered to me because all I was listening to at the time was the Is This It and Rufus Wainwright. Because I was just a kid startin out, and fuck if I would have downloaded anything described as "power pop" or "Canadian." The description they gave made me think it was a quiet adult contemporary album, and I never bothered with it until this year, a few months before this new one came out, and given the sync of it falling to me in the first days of spring, I was completely enraptured by it and I didn’t turn it off or take it out of my car for weeks. A wave carried this album, a current running through the whole thing and putting the songs in context. Each one was distinct in melody and sound, and the best thing about it, I thought, was that it showcased all the different vocalists during its first half, and then, on "To Wild Homes," all three voices came together in this hugely beautiful choir, where if you listened either very intently or very distractedly you couldn’t quite tell if you were hearing Dan Bejar, Neko Case, or Carl Newman. It would have been a stunning finale to the album, but I won’t complain, because it only got better anyway.


I guess that "other one" is a bigger presence on Electric Version, and maybe that’s why I don’t like it as much. Neko sang all my favorite songs on Mass Romantic, and although the ones she does on EV are just as good, the ones sung by Bejar and Newman aren’t nearly as strong. I don’t want to completely set the two albums at odds, but it’s hard not to compare them, because they don’t differ in any way except in quality. The production’s the same, the songwriting follows the same rules, and the lyrical themes are ambiguous in similarly frustrating ways (they’re too disjointed and nonsensical, and although some of them might actually mean something past my dense head, I doubt it. As long as the band is writing lyrics like "The education must have cost her / The loose translation must have lost her / Yeah", they could at least make them sound good phonetically, using words like "railroad" and "kitchen" instead of the clumsy ones they did choose).


I wish I could pull some Emotive Music Review 101 shit here like I used to do in my Ben Weasel and Flaming Lips reviews, but the main, fundamental problem with this album is that as good as the melodies are, it really does fall flat in trying to get you to feel anything. With some very notable exceptions, the hooks fail to do anything but sound right. The best melodies ever written, like, say, the one at the climax of Dylan’s "Visions of Johanna", can mysteriously convey an emotion simply by sounding the way they do, going through notes in a rhythm pitch and speed that somehow touches us. If I knew how to explain this further, I’d be writing hit singles, not reviews, but I’m sure you can think of some examples yourselves. Or yourself. Depends on how many people lost interest in the site after Todd reviewed 11 albums in two weeks, I guess.


Electric Version took me by surprise- it showed me that a good melody isn’t always enough. Having listened to the Mountain Goats every day this year, I had become convinced that production was all a sham, a cover up that, as Graham Coxon said of the new Blur album, is used only to "polish a turd." If John Darnielle can make music as moving and universally emotional as he does with zero production, then logically, the melodies must be the only essential thing. Having said that, the technically impeccable hooks on Electric Version just aren’t enough. Maybe it’s the detachment in Newman’s voice that holds them back, maybe it’s the aimless lyrics, or maybe, although I doubt it, it’s the production. Mass Romantic grabbed you, and not just because the hooks were tight. Here, even the usually riveting Dan Bejar sounds uninspired, and all three of his contributions come and go unremarkably.


When it hits though, it does wonders, like on "The Laws Have Changed" and "The New Face of Zero and One." These two songs succeed because they build momentum like most of the others can’t, mirroring in miniature the slower and ultimately more effective crescendo that rode through the entirety of Mass Romantic. They blow what could have been a wonderfully triumphant finale in "The New Face...", but it’s pretty rewarding anyway.


It’s exhausting in how close it comes, most of the time, approaching the edge of greatness but turning away and jumping comfortably back into the verse while we stand and yell at it to come back and give it another try. Never comes though, and it feels good when the last song’s over.