Metric lead singer Emily Haines take the lead on “Protest Song,” breathy and propulsive, with a typically personal approach to the political: “Well it is whatever it is / And you are wherever you are.” Newer recruit Ariel Engle, an odder and more ethereal presence, handles “Gonna Get Better” (“Things’ll get better / ’Cause they can’t get worse”) and “Stay Happy,” which is even more hell-bent on finding joy amid whatever might be causing you despair. (Resilience in the face of what is up to you: For many listeners, the aging process will be quite enough.) The sound is mercifully unchanged: pure Classic Indie Rock with noisy bedroom-ambient undertones but a fundamental and strident 600-guitar swirl that will never quite be in style again and will never go totally out of style, either. That pattern holds true on Hug of Thunder, the first BSS record since 2010’s Forgiveness Rock Record and a bombastic but somehow gentle fount of resilience and resistance. But her brief brush with megafame never threw Broken Social Scene out of orbit or overshadowed her many bandmates. Here she is tearing into You Forgot It in People’s noisy and exuberant “Almost Crimes” in 2013 on Jimmy Fallon, in a rowdy 10th-anniversary performance that nicely encapsulates the band’s “let’s put on a talent show and all perform simultaneously” appeal.įeist has likewise moved at a leisurely pace since that heyday and put out a modestly excellent new solo album, Pleasure, her first in six years, just this April. This crew’s most famous member is, of course, Feist, the unlikely iPod Nano spokeswoman whose 2007 solo album The Reminder is probably as great, or at least as commercially appealing, as egalitarian Canadian alt-rock gets. Broken Social Scene were billed as a supergroup of bands you just didn’t know you loved yet, and many of its offshoots - the dream-pop melodrama experts in Stars, the flashy New Wave bruisers in Metric - now have deep discographies and obsessive fans all their own. You Forgot It in People is a delightful time capsule for an era when an ecstatic Pitchfork review could seemingly catapult an artist to modest stardom single-handedly - a preview of the Arcade Fire–style feeding frenzies soon to come. You can never be too old for that sort of thing, and never too young, either. “You said survive.” It is the sound of growing old and doing some shit. “You said we’re halfway home,” goes the first monster chorus on Hug of Thunder. But Broken Social Scene have that effect on people: a paralyzing nostalgia for 30 seconds ago, a cautious but infectious optimism about what’s coming 10 years from now. It drives you crazy, listening to extremely young people agonize about the aging process. Bonus fun fact: Lorde was 16 years old when it came out. But the real action’s in the chorus, which is as startled and lackadaisical as the rest of the song, but stumbles across something approaching wizened grace:Įleven years later, on “Ribs,” a gorgeously morose deep cut from her debut album, Pure Heroine, Lorde paid tribute to some crucial makeout music from her, uh, youth, beginning thus:įun fact: “Ribs” is the best song on Pure Heroine. If that ain’t explicit enough for you, the second verse adds the line, “Swallowing words while giving head.” Maybe stage-cough real loud during that part, if you’re listening to this with your mother. From the onset, singer and nominal frontman Kevin Drew had a talent for making the vague sound devastatingly specific, the prurient sound profound: “Lover’s Spit” was You Forgot It in People’s apex, a woozy and pornographic piano jam about the sobering allure of young, drunken lust. But go back to the old stuff first, if only to connect with their younger selves, and maybe your younger self while you’re at it. It’s lovely, and rousing, and extremely well named. They have a new album, Hug of Thunder, out Friday - their first in seven years. They’d be one of those winningly pompous “more onstage guitarists than crowd members” propositions, were it not for their 2002 breakthrough album You Forgot It in People, which did wonders for their average crowd size. Broken Social Scene are a Toronto-based collective comprising anywhere from six to 600 people.
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