Feel Good Lost

It starts with the slow, shimmery "I Slept With Bonhomme At The CBC," before shifting into the steady, unexceptional "Guilty Cubicles." A more rock-edged sound appears (the slow-burning "Love and Mathematics"), along with eerie songs (the experimental-sounding "Passport Radio" and too-quiet "Blues for Uncle Gibb") and melodious pop (the stately "Alive in 85," bouncy "Cranley's Gonna Make It").

The sound of "Feelgood Lost" is a lot less polished and complex than their second album. But don't be deceived -- this is no demo or B-side album. It's just a group that hadn't fully come into bloom yet. There's rock, there's pop, there's even the murmuring, sweeping experimental soud of "Passport Radio," which sounds like the soundtrack to a surrealist computer-animated movie.

Violins, keyboard and synthesizers meld together seamlessly from the very start, with faintly strumming guitars and steady percussion underneath it. There's even a bit of fuzz guitar at the end of "Love and Mathetmatics." The funny thing about Broken Social Scene is how the music all seems to meld together into one big shimmering whole, especially in the slower, softer numbers.

Sweet, silvery atmospheric pop is the staple of Broken Social Scene, and their first album lives up magnificently to that. It's a bit rougher, but the spirit of it is still there. "Feelgood Lost" isn't lost anymore...

The biggest err one can make is expecting this album to be anything like "Forgot". If anything, it's quite the opposite - no barn-storming guitars, no extreme pace changes, and hell, no vocals! This album has the pure and simple goal of hitting atmosphere - and it does its job incredibly well.

This is an emotional album, pure and simple. Each piece evokes a feeling or mood inside of you - sometimes you just have to wait until the right moment. This album is the soundtrack to your own self-made Volkswagon commercial - driving a road at night with the sunroof down; these are the songs that are in the background. Take the fuzzed-out atmosphere guitar of "Passport Radio" as a good guiding light for the eve. The drums decide to want to dance around a little bit on "Alive in 85", but something like the near-tribal "Stomach Song" comes into play, and your mindset is changed yet again. The band finds melodies in simple-yet-beautiful guitar lines, like a downtempo Explosions in the Sky. Throughout the album, a particular string sample does occasionally find its way into the songs, as if to act as a unifying theme - it never fully materializes, but provides a glimmer of familiarity in the sometimes vast-instrumental landscape that lies before you.

Every listener will identify with a particular section of the album or a particular song, which leads to my personal highlight of the album, the mere 3:06-long "Guilty Cubicles" - a lullaby of a guitar line that creates a feeling of desired love and nights where getting home is only a secondary priority. It's a beautiful highlight to an already-beautiful album.

By all means, this isn't something you absorb in one listen. It will take awhile for the "Forgot It"-fan to get used to this slower and dreamier incarnation of the band, but for those who can lay expectations aside and accept the album for what it is - you have a new soundtrack for you life. Enjoy.