Every album anniversary tour is also about the march towards death. Ben Gibbard is no longer the baby-faced up-and-comer who made Transatlanticism and Liz Phair is no longer the romantically frustrated 25-year-old who made Exile in Guyville, but they’re still bringing these milestone albums on tour, inviting us to reflect on how they’ve changed and we’ve changed and everything’s decayed in the years since we first heard them. We’re all getting closer to the grave, but at least “Fuck and Run” still bangs.
Kevin Drew, of Broken Social Scene fame, has spent the past year negotiating the same nostalgic mindfuck, performing 2002’s You Forgot It in People in full to audiences for whom “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” and “Lover’s Spit” were as formative as Sgt. Pepper’s. If that record’s 20th trip around the sun made you feel old, how do you think Drew feels? Now, after revisiting the creative output of his twenties, he returns to the unsettled present on a short, grayscale solo record that’s literally titled Aging.
If Drew’s 2007 debut, Spirit If…, was a solo album in name only—billed as “Broken Social Scene Presents,” with swelling arrangements featuring many of Drew’s bandmates—Aging is the real thing. Shorn of the communal spirit that courses through BSS’s records, these are brooding, synth-heavy dispatches from middle age. “My skin is cold/I’m not aging right,” the 47-year-old croons on “Awful Lightning,” a six-minute centerpiece that wrings slow-burning drama from Hauschka-like piano arpeggios.
Drew has long excelled at writing emotionally resonant songs even when you don’t have a clue what he’s singing about. (SongMeanings.com commenters will crack “Shampoo Suicide” as soon as the cops find Jimmy Hoffa’s body.) But Aging was written as Drew grappled with the loss of friends and mentors, and death has a way of nudging songwriters towards the blunt and direct. At times, it’s disarming to hear him singing to us so plainly about his troubles.
On the burbling, melancholy “Elevators,” his deepening baritone sounds uncannily like Matt Berninger as he puts a cosmic spin on grief: “Elevator please change your name/Because they’re coming for me tonight/And my friend died.” “Party Oven” summons the nocturnal musings of a guy wondering if a lifetime of debauchery was all worth it. The stirring song captures a lot of feeling in few words; when Drew sings, “We partied into your grave/Was that okay?” you can detect grief and guilt mingling together.
