#Broken social scene feel good lost full#

And for mid-aughts post rock, that’s about as good as it gets. It’s a record just as suited for undivided attention as it is to be placed in the background. Rarely do the songs meander and a highlight like “Auberge Le Mouton Noir” feels so precise that it stops on a dime. With songs often running well over the five-minute mark, what’s remarkable about the album is just how deliberate everything is. mix extended, guitar-driven compositions with subtle orchestration and plenty of room for noisy textures and sonic explosions. On 2003’s Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn, Spearin and co. For Do Make Say Think, whose Charles Spearin has played guitar for BSS for their whole run, Constellation fit their post-rock experiments, where they could sit comfortably with Constellation’s most esteemed act, Godspeed You! Black Emperor. By the late aughts, Metric would experiment with self-release, while Do Make Say Think stuck with Constellation Records for their albums. Interestingly, though, not all of his BSS bandmates used the label for their own releases. Kevin Drew co-founded his own label, Arts & Crafts, to put out Broken Social Scene albums and, eventually, it became one of Canada’s preeminent independent labels.

And at the center is Drew, surrounding himself with dense, lush arrangements and singing straight from the heart on the holy “Lover’s Spit” and the whispered guitar-rock opus “Cause = Time.” Years later, when Lorde would shout them out on her own song “Ribs,” it was a heartening confirmation that the BSS sounds were just as relevant to a new generation of teens as they were to the last one.ĭo Say Make Think: Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn

Brendan Canning’s “Stars and Sons” sleeks around the corner like a guilty dog Feist’s vocals a barely recognizable as she goes full rocker on “Almost Crimes” Emily Haines is tasked with turning a tender and delicate repetition into an genuine all-timer on “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl” and Andrew Whiteman croons convincingly on the nuanced “Looks Just Like the Sun.” The parts are all great on their own, but the sum adds up to something so much more. As a collective, it’s in the numbers of voices and sounds that the album finds its success. But once the record starts to reveal its pop undertones, the specialness of the band also becomes apparent. Interestingly, the record gets a smooth transition from their more ambient beginnings, taking its time before Kevin Drew’s vocals appear midway through the album’s second song. Sure, it wasn’t the first Broken Social Scene record - that honor goes to the mostly instrumental 2001 debut Feel Good Lost - but You Forgot It in People was certainly the record that began the band’s mythic stature. Ahead of this record is a perfect time to look back at the best works the band’s members have offered until now.īroken Social Scene: You Forgot It in People

The concept of Broken Social Scene remains fluid, but the music is something that’s always been built to last.

Performances now run the risk of a child storming the stage and refusing to leave until her parents acknowledge her. It’s the first time where you can see pictures of the group and realize that they are no longer a collective of young people. “People thought it was not going to work out from an ego perspective,” Drew recently told Pitchfork, “but the reason it has comes down to the relationships.”Īnd another milestone reached by the band: the release of their fifth full-length album and first in seven years, Hug of Thunder. There are 17 members now - not all of them active and touring - and when they are not involved in the BSS process, each has their own distinct musical endeavors that they pursue. But by 1999, BSS was on its way to being a literal project before it coalesced into a figurative concept.

Some of them met in school, others on tours. Some of its members have even eclipsed the group’s own popularity (Feist, Metric) while others make up the bones of a very particular moment in the aughts of indie history where sights were set above the Canadian border and projects like Do Say Make Think, Stars and Apostle of Hustle all were treated with a particular reverence.Īs Metric’s Emily Haines told the New York Times in 2006, Broken Social Scene is “somewhere between a tribe and a cult”. “Let’s hear it for friendship,” Broken Social Scene bandleader Kevin Drew requested during a recent performance in Los Angeles, surrounded by a dozen of his buds who have turned a loosely formed artistic collective into an enduring indie rock supergroup.

#Broken social scene feel good lost full#