The Sharp Things A Moveable Feast by: Joseph Coscarelli Mon:29-Oct-07 Label: Bar/None Year: 2007 WB rating 25 out of 100

In the highest tiers of the independent rock music world, Broken Social Scene parade 10 musicians on stage to wade through their dense jungle of recorded tracks, relentlessly piling on until the foundation crumbles and collapses – just the sound they were looking for. The New Pornographers split duties between three distinct vocalists, each with a main creative output. The result is so disjointed that it somehow comes around full circle to feel cohesive. These groups are dubbed "collectives." Their contemporaries like The Divine Comedy, Stars and Sufjan Stevens incorporate elements of classical music – a grand string section, brass, woodwinds – to create lush, sweeping costumes with which to dress simple, three-chord cores. The result is called "orchestral" or "chamber pop." 

For all of the aforementioned groups and songwriters, the band's population or classical dabbling feels born of a rock 'n roll spirit somewhere deep down. It's about community: gathering all of your buddies, shoving them in a room with their weapon of choice and making do. It feels like an experiment – a friendly one, but still an experiment. Like a child toying with something slightly dangerous, just for the thrill. 

For The Sharp Things, to their credit, it's just natural. The New York City group are a collective in a much more orchestral sense, divided neatly into musical sections serving their assigned purpose, whether it be the staccato march of a string phrase or triumphant announcement in a horn passage, careful not to step on each other's toes – an overlap that might be celebrated on say, a mammoth Broken Social Scene track. Currently counting 11 musicians as full-time members, with instruments already ranging from tenor sax to euphonium and flugelhorn, on their latest full-length the group makes use of the entire New York Symphonic Arts Ensemble, a 40-piece orchestra, conducted by Sybille Werner. Unfortunately, the collective's third LP, A Moveable Feast, is a scattershot, uneven affair suffering from lackluster production unequipped for such a grand enterprise.   

The album, named for the tragic Hemingway memoirs, does not paint a particularly desolate picture as its title might suggest. It instead loses any conceivable flow due to genre-hopping and an array of awkward half-baked elements conceptually, lyrically and in arrangement. Take, for instance, opening number 'The Jumpers'. Over ambient room noises, a string trio builds a circular pattern and a deep male lead vocal plays octaves with the shrill violin. The cello, though, sounds out of tune while bells and cymbals crash, all before operatic backups and primitive chants crowd the track. Such animated vocals, pulled deep from the stomach, dominate the record with the bombast of musical theater, too often colliding with the light, symphonic arrangements. Feast's first half includes a puzzling variety of stylistic shifts from the mega-church Christian lite-rock of 'Storm King' (muddied by excessive reverb) to the Marvin Gaye pseudo-soul of 'Cruel Thing,' never bothering to clue the listener in to the steps in between the canyon-wide jumps in genre.  

Separated by an accordion interlude from The Hold Steady's Franz Nicolay, the album's second half fares no better as an acoustic guitar takes the lead. As if to say, "we enjoy folk music, too!" The Sharp Things employ "la, la, las" and handclaps over jangly rock on 'Bureau De Change' while distorted guitar and horns roar dully on 'The Devil In You Sings.' Mopey and MOR, 'Don't U Leave Me This Way' offends more than its Prince-like "U" in the title with backup harmonies reminiscent of Michael McDonald's cheesy blue-eyed soul.  

That the record is disjointed would be easier to forgive should individual tracks stand alone as strong in their own right, but on A Moveable Feast the songs retain an amateur quality only enhanced by inconsistent production featuring poor level-mixing, missed notes and all-round flat sonics. Such numerous and obviously talented musicians should demand more from a piece's core – the songwriting – or do what so many mainstreamers have done and at the very least, mask flimsy songcraft with some immaculate production. On A Moveable Feast both are absent.