Bob Wiseman
Theme and Variations
Blocks Blocks Blocks

If you spend any time with a songwriter you may end up cast in a role on their next album. If you spend five years with them, then leave them for someone else, you'll probably inspire a few albums' worth of angst.

Based on the title, I was expecting Bob Wiseman's second release with the Blocks Blocks Blocks collective to be more classical or jazz (something like the Beware of Bob jazzy trio release in 1994). Instead, there are nine folky variations on the theme of love (and heartbreak). The first song asks the simple question, "Who Am I?", which is answered by track two: "Man of Misery." Even the upbeat auto-erotic "Search the World" follows the theme of pain, betrayal and loss. There's the backup-singer who left because "this was all too right," and instead she prefered misery. Or the songwriter who left him for someone else. Or the discovery that he is but one of three men, and "it's a secret to all of them." But he tells it most plainly in the two-minute final track: "she broke my heart in the meanest way possible / she saw another man behind my back / she was my best friend for five years / now it's all cracked."

I'm guessing these are variations on the same relationship, and he even uses her name in "Passion Flowers," a tune where he starts the song with "the gods drank some wine and invented you" and ends with "set free to move solo through the world with only the memory of the magic girl." It's either the bitterest CD I've heard in a long time, or the most honest. It's certainly blunt. "The saddest day of my life was her goodbye note, she found a paint-by-number drunk that couldn't cope." I'm hoping the process was at least purgative. It was definitely creative.

Assisting Wiseman while he pulled out diary pages and shredded them into his guitar was (among others) Don Kerr on drums, Julie (Broken Social Scene) Penner on violin, and the voices of Mary Margaret O'Hara, Sarah Harmer, John Southworth, and Magali Meagher (formerly of the Hidden Cameras and now of the Phonemes). It's hard to tell who did what though, since the female counterpoint is so strangely arranged. Ghostly.

Getting back to "Man of Misery," it's a nine-minute essay on heartbreak that doesn't sound overly long or unneccessarily sentimental. Chris Banks on bass and Paul Linkletter on drums (and Wiseman on synth) power it right along and keep the song from getting mired in a narrative built on misery. "Three Men" turns the same theme into dark comedy. "The Henry Moore Room" takes a rootsy-blues fugue where the narrator seeks the comfort of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Earnest and intensely personal.

Gabino Travassos
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