With “characters… [that] float listlessly through a world they don’t feel part of, grasping at anything around them that might give them an identity,” Canadian Invasion draws heavily from Sartre and Camus styled existentialist absurdity and also reminds me of the same dissociative depersonalization disorder used in the recent comedic indie film, Numb.
Aspiring more to become the musical version of filmmaker David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive) or dark short story author Raymond Carver (whose work was used as the basis of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts), Canadian’s press notes continue that the group’s songs — especially the album’s title track — work as “a commentary” on the “’invisible hand’ of progress and equilibrium,” that has resulted in individuals’ “desperate, ghost-like existences, [and] ones they feel incapable of changing.”
Having earned quite a following around the East Coast, which they tour incessantly, Canadian Invasion has found like-minded colleagues, playing alongside such musical icons as David Bowie and Lou Reed. And once one hears the album’s third track complete with the security-alert title “Standing On the Shoulders of the Carcass of John Mayer” as they update the central premise of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” of shooting a man in Reno "just to watch him die,” by singing about murdering “John” who cut in line at the grocery store yet in doing so he still “doesn’t feel like an asshole” thanks to his interest in Hegel and Nietzsche, you realize they’re right at home in the world of Bowie and Reed.
Slightly pretentious and hard to fall for lyrically, it’s nonetheless comprised of some truly awe-inspiringly rich arrangements, instantly catchy ditties, and unexpectedly filled with beauty such as the incredible Beatles-esque “But You’re God (And I’m Me,”) and Doves-like “My Swashbuckling Days Are Over.”
And while it’s extremely clever to try and counter that with ugly lyrics so that it’s a bit dissonant, maybe the remedy would’ve been a bit less Hegel and Nietzsche and a bit more Lynch to surprise us with humor and intrigue since just pairing up the lyrics with the great hooks and catchy tracks isn’t enough after you start really paying attention to the words.
The negativity and downright gloominess of the lyrics about underachievers who mostly kill time, trying to find alcohol or — going for the twang in a Wilco-styled alt-country track “Neighbors” — as they lament an “empty whisky bottle” or in the equally bleak yet contradictorily beautiful sounding “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” “crashing your party/refusing to leave” is sure to earn them fans among the college set. But by not offering humor or going for the fully absurd (a la Ben Folds, Ben Kweller, or Beck), mostly it’s a downer dressed up as a pop record.
Article comments