Everything to Everyone

From its tongue-in-cheek cover art on down, Barenaked Ladies’s Everything to Everyone is a surprisingly tough-minded survey of early 21st-century culture. Often accused of being too clever for their own good, Toronto’s Ladies here provide a good deal of subtlety along with the expected tunefulness and genre-hopping. "Testing 1,2,3" is a complex song about nostalgia, singing in a rock & roll band that’s loved for perhaps narrow reasons, and watching one’s ex-girlfriend find a new lover. "Maybe Katie" presents two different views of the male fear of commitment before dropping a key bit of information about its title subject. And "Shopping" is a fist-in-velvet-glove tune in the tradition of the Housemartins’s "Happy Hour;" could its happy-go-lucky chorus be a skewering of George W. Bush’s pro-commerce response to Sept. 11? At the very least, it demonstrates that these guys fully understand the art and the implications of being all things to all people. --Rickey Wright