Sorry, I just had to get that out of my system.
Three, as the song says, is a magical number, and it's clear that Joel Plaskett agrees with that - after all, he's crafted an entire album here around the idea of the number three – three discs, with nine songs (or three sets of three) on each disc, for a total of twenty-seven (or three to the power of three) songs on the entire album. Additionally, the majority of the song titles on the album feature a single word repeated three times (such as Deny, Deny, Deny and Precious, Precious, Precious). There are also a bunch of references throughout the lyrics to the number three.
Three's a powerful number, too, in a lot of ways – look at enough material in areas as diverse as visual art, psychology, philosophy, literary theory, or linguistics and you see the number three pop up in all sorts of places. So it's definitely fair ground for Plaskett to explore in and album, although he does explore it more from the perspective of “let's use this to help me tell the story I want to tell here.”
And tell it he does. Over his last couple of albums, Plaskett has been building up a reputation for himself as one of Canada's leading songwriters, and this album is a perfect showcase of where that reputation's been coming from. Halifax has long been known as a focal point for accessible, fun indie pop-rock music, and Three definitely keeps that tradition alive. It's a traditional record in other ways as well, blending elements of folk and Maritime music in with the more rocking elements. It's done in an almost seamless manner, and you don't really think of it as a combination of different genres, but just as its own organic thing. The same is true for Plaskett's use of additional vocalists throughout the record – they're not voices you'd usually here on a Joel Plaskett record, but they sound like they completely belong there, and you get the feeling you'd really miss them if they weren't there.
Lyrically, the album is really strong as well. Songs of love and abandon are often best told through metaphor, and Plaskett shows a strong command of that throughout the album, admitting things like “I was the Berlin wall, and you were a wrecking ball in a summer dress.” It doesn't come across like it's trying to be Important, and states itself simply, but in doing so manages to really strike the listener.
If there's any limitations to the album, it's that Plaskett is a little too committed to his central motif. There's enough good tracks on Three to make an absolutely flawless double album, but to keep the theme of threes going, However, it feels like there's a couple of songs on there that would have been better as B-sides (like Pine, Pine, Pine and the epically long On, On, On). I can't help but notice that the songs I thought were extraneous also happened to be among the ones that followed the triple naming structure. But take those few songs out and you're got two discs of practically perfect pop-rock, and what's not to like about that?
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