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Broken Social Scene: Broken Social Scene
Arts & Crafts, 2005
Rating: 4.1
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Posted:
October 18,
2005
By
Peter Landwehr
The watchword for Broken Social Scene on
You
Forgot It in People was "variety". The band's sophomore album was a
blend of styles ranging from folk to post-rock that evoked a strange
combination of childlike joy and depressive melancholy, and managed to
win the Canadian band a Juno Prize and a large underground following.
Identifying leaders of a 17-member collective (whose participants
cross-pollinate with other bands) is hard. Nonetheless, the delay in the
arrival of the group's self-titled third release can be at least partly
laid at the feet of producer David Newfeld, who set out to surpass his
impressive work on You Forgot and has refused to release
Broken Social Scene until satisfied. Whether he and the group have
managed that is debatable, but Broken Social Scene is certainly
an equal, albeit more difficult, successor to the band's last work.
For Broken, the band has created a sound that is still instantly
identifiable as Broken Social Scene but is more coherent than that of
You Forgot; it retains that album's sense of being many singles that
work well as a unified group, but each track on Broken has a
similar texture and energy. Newfeld's role in this process has been to
pull specific instrumental and vocal lines out of this chaos for optimum
effect. While very disorganized on first listen, after several spins the
cleanliness behind Broken's noise becomes clear.
Despite forgoing accessibility for complexity, in many ways Broken
Social Scene possesses the same pop sensibility as You Forgot;
"Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day)" starts out with choppy guitar
noise and and singer Kevin Drew wailing happily, before shifting to
triumphant horns with a backing chorus of "aah's". Despite these shifts,
the song retains its pop catchiness. "7/4 (Shoreline)", while at heart a
simple rock song, is blessed with an unconventional beat and complex
drumming. "Swimmers" is a fine synth-driven ballad sung by Leslie Feist
that captures the kind of mild but sincere longing that Broken Social
Scene has long since mastered. The album grows in complexity as these
softer touches are fully absorbed.
Broken Social Scene tries to be an extremely organized indie-rock
jam session -- something that a few, but hardly all, of the tracks on
You Forgot also tried. In some ways, its spiritual cousin is Sufjan
Stevens' Illinois,
another continuous album portraying an extremely complex picture that
resolves itself as joyous. Unlike Stevens, however, Broken Social Scene
decidedly remains a rock group, working in a much narrower vein; the
emotion backing each song here is inevitably upbeat yet lined with
sadness -- certainly Stevens would not end an album with the joyous
exultation that "It's All Gonna Break". The group has lost some of the
accessibility of You Forgot it in People, which wore its heart on
its sleeve with fewer emotional contradictions, but has maintained the
same emotional neediness at the previous album's heart. And to refer to
any album that maintains a band's theme while both distilling and
complicating its sound as less than a success is an error.
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