Even the presence of rapper K-Os (a fine emcee on his own, mind you) doesn’t sound out of place here. Sonic trickery abounds, the cut-and-paste schizo-pop of “Windsurfing Nation” (the album’s original title) being among the weirder moments. It seems that Broken Social Scene is incapable of leaving a perfectly good pop song be. “Swimming,” meanwhile, is another easy-going pop tune, one of the band’s most straightforward to date.Īmong the dense layers and more straightforward pop songs, there are curiosities. Leslie Feist provides yet another solid vocal performance, breaking the breezy, laid back pop sound with her strong set of pipes at the forefront. ![]() Lucky for us listeners, it is followed by the relatively straightforward pop tune “7/4 (Shoreline),” which is the rare song that takes an odd time signature (guess which one) and makes it sound like a solid four-four. The crashing cymbals of “Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day)” takes the album from a meandering instrumental into a driving anthem as life-affirming and commanding as it is woozy and disorienting. While those still reeling from that album’s sensory overload may not be able to comprehend how the band could possibly get any better, Broken Social Scene finds them finely perfecting their craft without losing any of the magic or spontaneity of before. As impressive as You Forgot It In People was, Broken Social Scene could be easily seen as a huge step forward for the band. There are still curious and baffling instrumentals to lure us in and string us along, like the opening “Our Faces Split the Coast in Half” or the brief “Finish Your Collapse and Stay For Breakfast.” There are still leaps in volume, like that of the off-kilter folk of “Major Label Debut” transitioning into the My Bloody Valentine sounding “Fire Eye’d Boy.” But somehow between You Forgot it in People and today, the volatile creative energy of the enormous commune pressurized into an album that seems, somehow, more focused, even if it is just an illusion. That could be because we’re used to the Toronto group’s scattered sensibilities by now, or maybe, just maybe, they set out to write a more unified album, rather than a deceptively scattered-sounding collection of songs. ![]() ![]() Somehow, they just seem to make more sense this time around. These songs, though still different than one another, aren’t as drastic as the jump from “Almost Crimes” to “Looks Just Like the Sun” or from “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” to “Cause=Time.” Or maybe they are it’s hard to say. Though still something of an indie rock jigsaw puzzle, Broken Social Scene’s self-titled follow-up sounds more like the work of a proper band than a collective. Somehow, it all holds together, like that perfect mix tape you’ve been striving to record. Listening to their 2003 album You Forgot It In People, you’d be hard pressed to find two songs that sound like they were written by the same band, but, (this is where it hits you, now) they all were! And somehow, that open-ended and unpredictable course they took us on made for one of the year’s best listens. ![]() There’s anywhere between 5 and 14 people in the “band” at any one point in time, and with that many opinions being stacked on top of one another, there’s bound to be some structural imperfection. Unfocused, scattered, incoherent, messy - you could apply any or all of these terms when describing Broken Social Scene, and you’d be right.
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