Raising the Fawn

The Maginot Line

(Sonic Unyon)

Record Review by Daniel Brody

Raising the Fawn vocalist and guitarist John Crossingham has spent time in the Broken Social Scene, but he’s so indie and cool that they’re merely a sideline for him.  Part of Broken Social Scene’s charm is their ability to synthesize many disparate elements into a tapestry of electronic and mellow rock collages.  This is partly due to the fact that Broken Social Scene had several hundred band members before their recent decision to scale things back a bit.  Raising the Fawn is a bit like taking one Broken Social Scene song—for example, “Cause=Time”—and then making a whole album out of it.  What The Maginot Line gains in consistency, it loses in excitement, and the whole thing comes off a bit stiff.

Several songs on The Maginot Line hover at six or seven minutes, and Raising the Fawn is aiming for the epic scope of grungy rock recently taken to new heights by ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead.  There’s a lot of surging waves of skronky guitar, building to a climax aided and abetted by some urgent booming drums...and then petering out into a mash of watery guitars and splashy cymbals.  It is the same old indie rock cliché, where a band thinks rocking out is just so macho and chauvinist, so they show you they can do it for a minute, only to undermine the whole idea by playing gentle reverb guitar arpeggios for the next several minutes afterward.  The best song on the disc, “The Matador,” takes a bit of a different tack, piling on sweet vocal harmonies and bellowing kettle drums and approximating the sound of a lost R.E.M. classic from the eighties.

Unfortunately, too much of this album turns up the volume without believing in the act.  Nothing on The Maginot Line approximates Raising the Fawn’s best song “Gwendolyn,” off their last album, The North Sea.  Its bubbly bassline and smooth, romantic sound stand at odds with their choppy and tossed-off latest offering.  Recommended only to hardcore Canadaphiles.