Broken Social Scene: Something For All Of Us...

BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE PRESENTS BRENDAN CANNING: SOMETHING FOR ALL OF US... (2008)

1) Something For All Of Us; 2) Chameleon; 3) Hit The Wall; 4) Snowballs & Icicles; 5) Churches Under The Stairs; 6) Love Is New; 7) Antique Bull; 8) All The Best Wooden Toys Come From Germany; 9) Possible Grenade; 10) Been At It So Long; 11) Take Care, Look Up.

Well, er, I suppose that Brendan Canning quickly followed up on Kevin Drew's «solo» album with his own one since he wanted us to insightfully compare his individual artistic vision with that of his partner. The trouble is, once I'd finished listening to Something For All Of Us..., I for­got absolutely everything I remembered about Spirit If..., so, what with this thing about a revie­wer's responsibility and all, I honestly went back to Spirit If... and gave it another twist. But then it turned out that, by the time the last song was over, I could not keep in mind even a single thing about Something For All Of Us... So, not wanting to disappoint my readers, I immersed myself once again in Brendan Canning's one-and-only solo oeuvre. It was not an unpleasant listen, but, needless to say, once I finally got down to the review, there was nothing in my head to compare it with. For some reason, Drew and Canning just couldn't share adjacent space in my memory cells. It was then that I finally got it — the two guys' styles are so similar that they act upon each other like two positive charges. Whatever you do, don't listen to them in a row. Put some AC/DC in between, or maybe a full CD of didgeridoo soloing.

Anyway, it's too late to be drawing serious comparisons now, so just a few quick words on whe­ther this «Broken Social Scene Presents: Brendan Canning» thing has any autonomous value, or if it can be used to generate awesome epiphanies in the brain, or if we should encourage the au­thor to develop this style even further. These few quick words, in their correct order, are: it hasn't, it cannot, and we shouldn't. Nice sound overall, though.

Apparently, Canning favours a slightly heavier sound than Drew: there are more distorted guitar parts here, more forceful percussion rhythms, and the anthem-to-ballad ratio seems a little heavier on the anthem side. But none of it matters, since most of the anthems are just straightahead «alt-pop» without any extraordinary melodic content. You know something is definitely not right here when the «element of surprise» on the album consists of unexpectedly encountering a disco bass line on one of the songs (ʽLove Is Newʼ) — as if this decision had some deep meaning (in reality, most likely, it is just part of the same old nostalgic trend, where people raised on disco, even if they thought they hated it when they were in their teens, were still surreptitiously encoded to re­turn to it twenty or thirty years later).

Of the rest, ʽChurches Under The Stairsʼ has some funny falsetto awoo-awooing; ʽAll The Best Wooden Toys Come From Germanyʼ is a short and pretty «ambient-folk» instrumental in the vein of BSS' first album; ʽPossible Grenadeʼ has a powerful riff-based coda; and that's all, folks — everything else is non-descript inasmuch as it can all be described by the small world of for­mulae long since set in stone. No better and no worse than the average BSS album, I think that Something For All Of Us... should be legally sued for moral damage by the word «something» — and honestly, I'd take something really wild, offensive, and disgusting, like Ted Nugent, over this sterile-packed «Piece Of Mass Art For The Progressively Illuminated 21st Century Art Lover» any time of day. Thumbs down.

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Broken Social Scene: Spirit If...

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Broken Social Scene: Forgiveness Rock Record

BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE: FORGIVENESS ROCK RECORD (2010)

1) World Sick; 2) Chase Scene; 3) Texico Bitches; 4) Forced To Love; 5) All To All; 6) Art House Director; 7) High­way Slipper Jam; 8) Ungrateful Little Father; 9) Meet Me In The Basement; 10) Sentimental X's; 11) Sweetest Kill; 12) Romance To The Grave; 13) Water In Hell; 14) Me And My Hand.

Discographies formally show a five-year hiatus between Broken Social Scene and Forgiveness Rock Record, but this is an illusion: in reality, two more albums were released in the interim as pseudo-«solo projects», one by Drew and one by Canning, even though many of the members of B.S.S. still played on both records, and stylistically they were not all that different from the usual stuff. We will return to them later on; for now, let us stick to formalities and see what happened on May 4, 2010, when once again they returned to us as Broken Social Scene, with yet another innovative three-word title that implies religious philosophy masking as popular music — or vice versa... hardly any difference either way.

Where there is some difference is in the subtle, but important shift of attitude. Over those five years, Broken Social Scene seem to have learned that (a) cramming fifty thousand instruments within the small confines of a five-minute anthem does not automatically make it mind-blowing and stupendous; (b) a distorted guitar rock foundation may endear you to the rigidly traditional «indie rock community», but there are also clear-cut limits to the spiritual power of the power chord; (c) precisely shaped hooks matter, after all, especially if you are trying to target the ave­rage concert-going Joe rather than some whacked out New Age-crazy audience — you have to get at least one or two of those on your album, or else you risk to irritate even the critics.

This does not mean that mediocrity will be suddenly replaced by genius or anything, but it does mean that the album never sounds as consistently annoying as its predecessor. Even its only in­strumental number, ʽMeet Me In The Basementʼ, puts a couple of simple, but effectively optimi­stic guitar / violin phrases on top of the usual pompous stomp that may draw your attention away from the generic rhythmics and chain it to something else — when that colorful three-note riff makes its appearance at 1:03 into the song, for instance, it produces a singular emotional jolt the likes of which B.S.S. rarely, if ever, hunted for in their early life.

The idea of «forgiveness» as such is exploited in ʽAll To Allʼ, an honestly beautiful little number that relies on electronic loops rather than rhythm guitars and a gorgeously universalist vocal part from Lisa Lobsinger — the manner in which she intones "you made your life on everything" is no different from the usual «hazy nymph» style of the 2000s (think Beach House or Broadcast or whatever else), but no less soulfully engaging because of that. And, God be praised, the song re­mains relatively uncluttered — just a few quiet violin flourishes and kaleidoscopic electronic sprinkling in the background here and there, enhancing the elfish mood rather than cloaking it. Or maybe I am just a sucker for all the ladies of B.S.S. — the second best song here, as far as I am concerned, is ʽSentimental X'sʼ, sung by an entire trio of indie houris (Leslie Feist, Emily Haines, and Amy Millan — apparently, the first time all three pooled their vocal cords together on the same song), also with a one-of-a-kind arrangement: now all the strings, electronics, and brass tacks have been carefully assembled and wound up in the background, leaving only the pulsating rhythms and the vocal harmonies in the foreground. It does feel better.

The loud, Wilco-ish folk-rockers have also been improved — ʽWater In Hellʼ, for instance, makes clever use of falsettos, thoughtfully separates the distorted rhythm and clean colorful lead guitars, and slows down the tempo to give the anthem a little barroom bravado; and ʽForced To Loveʼ is more reminiscent of the old noisy B.S.S., but the chorus is catchy anyway. For some fans, the major highlight came on with the melancholia / nostalgia of ʽSweetest Killʼ, and it does give off the impression of gorgeous profoundness for a minute or so; however, beyond the initial impression, the band did not find a proper way to develop the melody, so the song pretty much dug itself a profound pit in a matter of seconds, and then just stayed there.

Of course, it is still very hard to understand if there actually is anything that B.S.S. are «about». The line "I get world sick everytime I take a stand" may ring true with many people, but B.S.S. still think too much of themselves to allow the words and the music to shed some of its ambiguity — and if the band is transmitting any «message» at all, it hardly does itself a favor by ending the album with a song titled ʽMe And My Handʼ: "Me and my hand / We've been together since I was born", sung in a «John Lennon circa 1979, baking bread with one hand and playing guitar with the other» sort of style, is an awful idea to end the album, and a good reminder that, no mat­ter how much of an overall improvement the whole thing is, it is still the product of a «B-grade» band at best, sometimes lapsing into C-grade.

Still, a step up is a step up — essentially, there are more «pop» elements here than «rock» ones, and for Broken Social Scene, whose emotional palette rather consists of moody optimism and intelligent hope than depression, aggression, and sociopathy, this is a good, adequate shift of fo­cus. Throw in the seductive lady singers and occasional hooks, and a thumbs up becomes self-explainable. I will not force myself into the delusion that any of this stuff will have much «stay­ing power», but as long as it did stay around, it was pretty decent entertainment this time.

 
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Broken Social Scene: Broken Social Scene

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.

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Broken Social Scene: You Forgot It In People

BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE: YOU FORGOT IT IN PEOPLE (2002)

1) Capture The Flag; 2) KC Accidental; 3) Stars And Sons; 4) Almost Crimes; 5) Looks Just Like The Sun; 6) Paci­fic Theme; 7) Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl; 8) Cause = Time; 9) Late Nineties Bedroom Rock For The Mis­sionaries; 10) Shampoo Suicide; 11) Lover's Spit; 12) I'm Still Your Fag; 13) Pitter Patter Goes My Heart.

Only one year has passed and Broken Social Scene have already swelled from a guest-dependent rhyth­mic ambient duo to an eleven-piece orchestra, bashing out idealistically epic indie rock — in their own words, «anthems for a seventeen year-old girl», although most of this stuff is perfectly suitable for seventeen year-old boys as well (maybe it is the lack of any sort of «heaviness» in the arrangements that prompted them to address their female audiences). Their aspirations are noble, their ambitions humble, and their allusions subtle. Nevertheless, the reproachingly titled You For­got It In People fails to be that beautiful, long-coveted masterpiece that the critics had been waiting for, hurrying up to lavish all sorts of praises on the album when it came out.

The basic problem is that, despite switching to the traditional «rock song» format, the styles and attitudes remain essentially the same — this is still little more than nicely sounding, polyphonous background music, yet somehow, we are now supposed to be memorizing the themes, singing along to the anthemic choruses, and agreeing with its goal of «teaching» us something. I honestly tried doing all three of these things, but, unlike the average BSS fan, shamefully failed on all counts — the melodies were found unmemorable, the choruses generally uninviting, and the band's «soulfulness» hopelessly stuck in no-man's-land somewhere between Nick Drake, Bruce Springsteen, and Jeff Tweedy, all of whom they try to be at the same time. As you can imagine, it would take a bunch of miracle workers to do that, and even if there is one miracle worker among the eleven current members of BSS, it is pretty hard to spot him / her from among the other ten.

Do not get me wrong: nothing is overtly «bad» here, in fact, from a purely technical angle, the album is unassailable — genuine and diverse instrumentation, competent sound layering without any unwarranted chaos, pleasant, unaffected vocal tones, obscure, but not altogether meaningless lyrics, in short, everything within the limits of good taste and intellectual inoffensiveness. I fully understand how, for instance, all those people whose minds were just blown by Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot could want them to be re-blown with this record. But Yankee Hotel Foxtrot had «the spark» — actually, above everything else, it had a strong focus on hooks and personality. Broken Social Scene, in contrast, «focus» on... well, on a broken social scene.

It will suffice to make a first conclusion based on the album's first proper song, ʽKC Accidentalʼ, named after Kevin Drew's first band (the hazy Floyd-ian instrumental ʽCapture The Flagʼ is the formal opener, but it is only a brief ambient overture) — a few initially discordant guitar notes and violin scrapes quickly give way to a fast-paced anthem in the «over-the-waves» paradigm: deep rolling guitar waves, seagullish whistling violins, and electronic sirens wailing their way over the surface. But without even a single genuinely exciting part, this anthem only packs the technical ingredients for success — somewhere along the way these guys seem to have forgotten that a massive collective sound still has to have a great backbone, one that would still sound at­tractive when recorded at a piano or on acoustic guitar by one guy on a demo tape.

This is actually a proverbial truth that would very soon be made use of by BSS' Canadian partners, Arcade Fire, and this is why the equally anthemic Funeral is a modern masterpiece whereas You Forgot It In People is, for the most part, an impressively tasteful bore. When they revert to their old «moody» self, e. g. on ʽPacific Themeʼ or on the album closer ʽPitter Patter Goes My Heartʼ, they are not overreaching their grasp; when they dip into the freak-folk of ʽStars And Sonsʼ or the pomp-rock of ʽAlmost Crimesʼ, they are.

Only two songs on the entire album struck me as being out of the ordinary. The above-mentioned ʽAnthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girlʼ almost accidentally hits upon a beautifully tense vo­cal / instrumental sequence in the chorus — which works even despite the vocals being masked by a (seventeen year-old?) wheezy chipmunk effect; and the immediately ensuing pop rocker ʽCause = Timeʼ has a deliciously emotional riff popping out of the speakers around the 2:30 mark — and coming back in later. Consequently, these two songs have plain old heart-grappling hooks, unlike others that just have vague atmospheres and cool-sounding titles (although in 2002, thirty years after the hip intellectual freshmen had invaded the pop music business, who's to judge exactly how cool a title like ʽLate Nineties Bedroom Rock For The Missionariesʼ is supposed to look?).

Oh, actually, speaking of titles, the album was supposed to receive the Mark Knopfler Annual Re­ward for ʽI'm Still Your Fagʼ, but got sidetracked at the last moment as the jury became convinced that it is rather sung from the perspective of an unjustly deserted and psychologically traumatized cigarette butt. Besides, melodically it is a somewhat boring mix of folk and bossa nova — were it given a major stadium riff on the ʽMoney For Nothingʼ scale, the controversy over lines like "I swore I drank your piss that night to see if I could live" would have been much higher. But who really cares, as long as it's only a bunch of unknown Canadian hobos we're dealing with here?

I refrain from an overt thumbs down, if only out of respect for how much real sweaty work went into the final product — and an additional bonus of several really really pleasant moments — but as far as my own paradigm is concerned, You Forgot It In People does break the golden rule of «staying adequate»: it bites off far more than these eleven people might chew. Want it or not, they are just your average, regular, well-meaning, self-educated indie kids, and they do not know the meaning of life — heck, they do not even properly understand the meaning of getting eleven people together in one studio. Listenable and pretty, yes, but never great, and definitely overrated back in its time.

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Broken Social Scene: Feel Good Lost

BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE: FEEL GOOD LOST (2001)

1) I Slept With Bonhomme At The CBC; 2) Guilty Cubicles; 3) Love And Mathematics; 4) Passport Radio; 5) Alive In 85; 6) Prison Province; 7) Blues For Uncle Gibb; 8) Stomach Song; 9) Mossbraker; 10) Feel Good Lost; 11) Last Place; 12) Cranley's Gonna Make It.

The way Canada's huge landmass kinda stretches out all the way from modern civilization into the vast reaches of ice cold nothing, it might explain this odd propensity of its citizens for super­ficially grandi­ose, but essentially rather simple sonic landscapes — the construction of which in­volves so many people that sometimes it feels like some of them are only there to cast their mind­waves into the air, to emphasize the production.

Even before Arcade Fire, in particular, there was Broken Social Scene, a wandering, blundering troop of loosely connected artists revolving around the core elements of Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning. The music they play is sometimes called «post-rock», but since this term holds my per­sonal record for «dumbest genre designation ever created» (do we ever talk about «post-jazz»? «post-classical»? «post-pop»? «post-flamenco»?), I prefer to broadly refer to these exercises as «mood music». For a narrower way of pigeonholing, something like «rhythmic ambient ins­tru­mental folk-pop» might do, at least for this debut album.

The title is quite appropriate. This is an album in which it is very easy to get lost — in fact, I got lost in it somewhere around the third track, and have not found a proper way out since then — but just as easy to feel good about it. What Drew, Canning, and their team write and record are, for the most part, «pleasant dream sequences»: mid-length folk-pop compositions, usually based on guitar interplay, less frequently on keyboards or violins, that establish their groove very quickly, develop it very slowly or do not develop it at all, and hunt for a gradual subconscious effect rather than a quick open blow to the brain.

The response is not «psychedelic» or anything — for the most part, the band avoids indulging in spe­cial sonic effects; their chief weapon is the density of sound, achieved by cramming the studio with people, some of whom, as I already said, seem only to be there in order to be more «felt» than heard. But the response can be hypnotic, after a short while: they take all those nice, soo­thing, well-polished folksy chord sequences, shuffle them around, add some old-school pop, and then run this approach into the ground to the point where, at first, you might hate it for the mono­tonousness, but then acknowledge that there is really no objective way of criticizing this stuff. Be­cause the guitars sound gorgeous and tasteful, the sound density is achieved professionally, and the songs are all similar, but different enough to vary the mood ever so slightly.

If there is a direct old precursor to this style, it would be something like Fleetwood Mac's ʽAlba­trossʼ (strong echoes of which you will experience, in particular, on ʽBlues For Uncle Gibbʼ) — except that, naturally, with the passing of time the «one strong simple hook» approach has been replaced with an intellectualist passion for more complexity, even at the expense of memorability (according to what my brain tells me, ʽAlbatrossʼ is more «hummable» than all of these tunes put together). Not all of the compositions are slow — ʽI Slept With Bonhommeʼ opens the album on a steady toe-tappy note, and only a few numbers are genuinely «somnambulant» — but I feel as if the oddly accelerated tempos are only there to give the band a little bit more of an individual fla­vor — with these dreamscapes, you would normally expect super-slow all of the time, yet there are tunes here explicitly set to danceable rhythms. (One actual flaw is the use of drum machines on some of the tracks — you'd think that with so many people in the studio, they could have easily done with live drums everywhere, but no, there is still this goddamn oh-so-2000s nostalgic fondness for the pssht-pssht sound rearing its ugly head from time to time, as if it were «artsy» or something. It is not — it's just ugly).

Repeated listens do bring out molecules of individual charm — ʽGuilty Cubiclesʼ is all about cross-weaving arpeggios from multiple guitars (and mandolins), ʽPassport Radioʼ is about ma­king your violins sound like Mellotrons (or is that vice versa?), ʽAlive In 85ʼ is about how a mer­ry, swinging, looped jazz guitar riff feels in the company of Depeche Mode-style rhythmics (not very well), ʽLast Placeʼ is like a Brian Eno / Harold Budd minimalist piano collaboration set to metronomic rhythms, and ʽCranley's Gonna Make Itʼ gradually transforms into a sunset-style soft jazz mood piece, capped off with an atmospheric horn part. The feelings they generate are all quite similar (peace, warmth, serenity, and an inescapable urge to join the local Eco-watch), but the ways of generating them are different enough to lay off objective accusations of Broken So­cial Scene being a «one-trick» band.

That said, this is still a very modest thumbs up: for the most part, Feel Good Lost works as high quality back­ground music (muzak?), which is a bit inadequate in relation to the amount of human resources expended on it (I mean, Brian Eno at his best could achieve much the same effect with two fingers as this band achieves with a small army). Pleasant, positive, and tasteful indeed, but it is hard for me to imagine anybody capable of being «bowled over» with this sort of music.

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