All In Good Time

I managed to get my hands on an early copy of the new Barenaked Ladies album today, and before you call me a thief and a pirate, know that I preordered the album from iTunes and my paid copy is coming to me next Tuesday. There were some advantages to preordering, namely that I got one track early (“Every Subway Car”), and two tracks – “All In Good Time” and “She Turned Away” – were only available if you did the whole preorder thing. Those bonus tracks didn’t come with my early copy, so I’m going to the opposite of the Bruce Springsteen message board and reserve judgment on them until after I hear them.

All In Good Time is BNL’s first album without Steven Page, and regardless of whether you like the record or not, the absence is immediately noticeable. Ed Robertson has a perfectly fine voice, but Steve had a very distinctive voice, and going a whole BNL album without it will take getting used to. Kevin Hearn, who also has a very distinctive voice (a little thin, but definitely interesting), steps up with lead vocals on three tracks. Jim Creeggan, who provided one or two odd tracks on BNL’s earlier albums, and the interesting “Peterborough and the Kawarthas” on the more recent Barenaked Ladies Are Me, offers up two lead vocals here. This democratic voicework is fresh and interesting – I like that BNL has been moving back to this since BLAM – but I’m not sure how successful it is here.

Unfortunately, because Ed’s voice is mellow and unassuming, a few of the tracks on All In Good Time sound remarkably similar. Despite different musical directions, songs like “Ordinary,” “I Have Learned,” and “How Long” border on indistinct. Even the slow-jam groove of “Summertime,” can’t quite escape the samey-ness.

Kevin Hearn’s offerings suffer a bit, too, although with only three tracks to work with, they do so less. Though “Watching the Northern Lights” is the only unlistenable song on the album, “Another Heartbreak” is sweet and sad, and “Jerome” is terrific: a slow calypso that ranks among, say, “Hidden Sun” and “Another Spin” as Hearn’s best. Creeggan’s two songs – “On the Lookout” and “I Saw It” – are perfectly fine, the latter perhaps about Steve Page’s leaving the group.

Ed Robertson, too, has some issues with Steve’s absence; Ed Robertson is most comfortable here when he’s angry. “You Run Away” is pissed-off and plaintive, and “Golden Boy” is a raging screed. One can’t help but wonder if both are about Steve Page’s decision to abandon the band. “The Love We’re In” is also good, musically recalling Stunt’s “Long Way Back Home” and lyrically romantic and devastating. “Four Seconds” sounds the most like what people expect from BNL: a fast-paced novelty song in the vein of “One Week,” but its staccato rhymes (Ed manages to rhyme “orange” not once but four times) never make the song feel rote or compulsory. All In Good Time might have benefitted from more of this sort of idiosyncrasy.

As it stands, All In Good Time is a good album, not a great one. Maybe four of its songs – “Golden Boy,” “You Run Away,” “Jerome,” and “Four Seconds” – can stand among their best work, with two or three more perfectly good songs. It’s an interesting new direction for the band, and I’m intrigued to see where they go from here; I just wish their first step without Steve Page hadn’t been as shaky.