Album Review: Cedar - "Alternate Endings"

Cedar
Alternate Endings
(2010)


With the collapse of the founding wave in 1994 and the rush of major labels at the time to sign grunge-esque bands, the "post-grunge" era began. For those of us who were slightly too young to have witnessed the angst first-hand, we had to dig a few years back to understand the source of the 'post'-sound which came to dominate record sales and the MuchMusic video flow through the mid-90's. With grunge, the emotional dynamics had been cranked, apathy to scream, and along with the textural contrasts of distorted guitars and stark bass, a rejection of theatrics and posturing. Post-grunge adjusted the pallet. Some shimmer and sheen, and a pop sensibility emerged. Suddenly liking The Beatles, and an attentive, careful approach to songwriting was OK again. In Canada, this sound emerged in some part in the Halifax music scene, where bands like Sloan, Thrush Hermit and Superfriendz had headlined "the new Seattle." In the UK, it was Radiohead who had taken their teen years of Johnny Marr and Morrissey and married it with the post-grunge aesthetic in Pablo Honey and The Bends.

Formed in the early 2000's and heavily steeped in the aural textures and trappings of their post-grunge teen years, Toronto band Cedar have released their second album, Alternate Endings. With feet firmly planted in the sounds of the early 90's, Alternate Endings is a lush, spacious and at times, anthemic rock album whose overtures and interludes weave together a collection of songs that illuminate modern contrasts with a retrospective sound. Theirs is an un-self-conscious brand of post-grunge, concerned first, with heart and feeling.
Though the sound is similar to that of bands like Radiohead, the setting has changed. Where grunge and post-grunge bands contrasted rockstar posturing with abandoned factories and working class imagery, Cedar's city is a modern third-wave metropolis where we seek to reconcile a service-based life shrouded in glass, with the call of the wild and the haptic enticement of the organic. The music finds strength in this dichotomy. Over his flowing vocals, Craig MacLellan and Brett Trider's guitars, as on the track "This Spaceship" are at times tightly constructed edifices, built carefully on precision playing, reminiscent of Pavement or Sebadoh. At times, the songs and soundscapes grow rhizomatically, organically reaching skyward, like those in "Your Own World" or "Peaceful Protest at Fake Lake" where Cedar find themselves most pulling from the Dinosaur Jr. pallet often visited by Broken Social Scene. Jeremy Drury's frenetic drumming and the the clean tones of Pete Nickerson's unexpected and lyric bass complete the sonic package. Both balance control and chaos. They bottle lightning, and fill out the quiet contrasts to the carefully out of tune guitars of rhythmic standout "Not A Good Time."

Overall, there is a sense that Alternate Endings is simultaneously of, and very much not of, it's time and that it is with the impact and emotions of those early Radiohead days that it stands most aligned. Radiohead influencing a band is certainly not unheard of, especially in Toronto where throughout the beginning of the last decade once a week we would hear about this band that was the "new Radiohead." But whereas Pilate in those days simply emulated a vocal styling, Cedar manages to fully capture the energy of Generation X's heyday, and filter it through the well thought out approach of the un-ironic independent rock bands of today. Alternate Endings offers those of us who came of musical age in the 90's an opportunity to recapture moments with our younger selves, where we can revisit what became of our ambitions and love as we've aged and moved into a new era. For others, a younger generation, Cedar is a window on the last new beginning of rock music, from a time when blood and passion trumped kitsch, irony and sing-alongs.

Cedar will be bringing the sounds of Alternate Endings to the Cameron House in Toronto on April 2nd and the album is available in digital and 12" vinyl formats through www.cedarsongs.ca and your favourite digital music retailer.