BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE: BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE (2005)
1) Our Faces Split The Coast
In Half; 2) Ibi Dreams Of Pavement (A Better Day); 3) 7/4 (Shoreline); 4)
Finish Your Collapse And Stay For Breakfast; 5) Major Label Debut; 6) Fire
Eye'd Boy; 7) Windsurfing Nation; 8) Swimmers; 9) Hotel; 10) Handjobs For The
Holidays; 11) Superconnected; 12) Bandwitch; 13) Tremoloa Debut; 14) It's All
Gonna Break.
Thousands of minor differences from You Forgot It In People, but hardly a
single major one. Apparently, just because the band comprises so many people
now, all of them capable of somehow playing off each other, Drew and Canning
seem to think that these songs are gonna write themselves. Which sometimes
happens if your band comprises genuine geniuses — but in the case of Broken
Social Scene, it just comprises a bunch of freshly baked ambitious idealistic
bearded pop intellectuals, and the last time idealism, intellectualism, ambition,
and beard went together with genius was probably circa 1971, with Pete
Townshend working on Who's Next.
Once again, sixty minutes into the album I can
barely back-focus on anything that I just heard, despite the allegedly tasteful
and quite variegated combinations of instruments. The band sets an uplifting,
stomping pace, piles up five rhythm parts and seven leads on top of it, adds
multi-tracked male or female or androgynous vocals, and then gradually overcharges
the motor in order for it to go up in smoke and explode. The chords are loud
and bold, the vocals combine high pitch for emotional resonance and breathiness
for intellectual depth, and the song titles, as usual, stimulate you into
making new discoveries — such as Canadian writer Ibi (Kaslik). (Not that I will
ever find the time to read the lady, but «knowledge is power» all the same).
And that is pretty much it. This time, there is not even a single memorable riff of the
ʽCause = Timeʼ variety, and out of all their different grooves, only
ʽBandwitchʼ managed to stand out due to a cool «magical-mystery» vocalized loop
in the background — which did give it a little bit of a «witchy» flavor, a nice
change of pace from the core Springsteenisms. Naturally, one resonant idea on a
sixty-mninute album falls well within the scope of chance expectations — I am,
in fact, profoundly surprised that there were no others. How hard must it be to
write twelve epic pop anthems and be unable to make even one of them stick?
At least the «grand finale», grandly entitled
ʽIt's All Gonna Breakʼ, grandly encased in grand power chords and grand
romantic posturing, grandly making its grand point in just under 10 grand
minutes, should have been satisfactory. But the way I see it, like everything
else, it's all «formulaic form» and no interesting substance. Where Arcade Fire
would have soaked this thing in aching end-of-the-world desperation, Broken Social
Scene remain firmly stuck directly between sadness and joy — at point zero,
that is. Which is why, when they finally get to the end and wrap it up with a solemn
«mock-classical» coda, I do get the urge... to strangle somebody.
For accuracy's sake (as well as extra proof
that I did listen carefully to the album, just in case), the start of ʽHotelʼ is
not half bad, with a simple, but tough bassline that carries more punch by itself
than any given «loud», «pseudo-symphonic» passage on the rest of the record; ʽFire
Eye'd Boyʼ could have been a semi-decent generic indie single if the vocals didn't
sound taken from a post-laryngitis recuperating bunch of patients; and
ʽWindsurfing Nationʼ has a spoonful of lovely psychedelic guitar licks, barely discernible
from under a ton of extra overdubs. But — repeat — this is all just for
accuracy's sake. The album as such shows that the critical praise, received by You Forgot It In People, went to
someone's head, and if the record is to be evaluated in context, well — it is a
further step down, and this time around, I cannot help letting it off with a thumbs down
as an impressive heap of pretentious, elaborate, sweet-scented indie garbage.
Check "Broken Social Scene" (MP3) on Amazon
No comments:
Post a Comment