![]() ![]() So This Book Is Broken stands not as some throwaway of an also-ran group, but rather one of the strongest works of modern music journalism, an oral history that mythologized and solidified a band’s origin and rise before they were ever really codified into the canon. What Broken Social Scene did wasn’t necessarily groundbreaking or revolutionary, but they provided a beacon of possibility that a community could sustain itself through music, even in the 21st century. You can see their sense of an insular but inviting community in pretty much every music scene that exists today, from the incestuous feeling of the DIY communities in Brooklyn and Boston to the participatory quality of acts like Los Campesinos! or The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die. When it was published in 2009, it may have felt slightly premature, but a few years down the line, Broken Social Scene’s impact is undeniable. In 2007, Stuart Berman - one of the first to write about BSS in any critical capacity, mainly because he ran in the same Toronto circles as them when they were first starting out - went around and interviewed pretty much anyone who had anything to do with the band or the scene that they inhabited. From the band name on down, Broken Social Scene were destined to lead a fractured, messy existence.įirst off, it’s impossible to write an article about this band without paying tribute to This Book Is Broken, an essential document if you want to know about the band’s formation, trajectory, and initial impact. Broken Social Scene were a collective in the best sense of the word, and the ever-expanding and -contracting nature of the group was built into its foundation. ![]() And though Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning would become the axis around which the group eventually spun, there are countless others that contributed to the revered status that the band has today. ![]() These bands grew out of - or, really, created - the hotbed that was the late-’90s/early-’00s Toronto music scene, and all of them owe their enduring popularity, at least in part, to the massive force that was Broken Social Scene. Feist, Metric, and Stars are the obvious touchstones - and they all deserve articles like this of their own one day - but even the smaller groups and progenitors of BSS are beyond compare: hHead, Do Make Say Think, Apostle Of Hustle, Cookie Duster, and, of course, KC Accidental. The amount of talent inside and on the periphery of this band is monumental. The core members may be down to nine, with an emphasis on founders Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning, but the “additional members” and “guests” involved (31 strong, when all is said and done) are what make Forgiveness Rock Record unique, especially in an era where bloated membership is so often used as a gimmick.Has there been a better collective in the past two decades than Broken Social Scene? I really doubt it. That’s not to say that the guts of the record are filler, as some of the best moments are its most nuanced ( Emily Haines, Leslie Feist, and Amy Millan’s breezy, instantly engaging “Sentimental X,” the easy, dusty “Highway Slipper Jam”), proving once again that an army can make a cohesive album if everyone follows the rules of engagement. Bolstered by a handful of evenly spaced, arena-sized rockers like “World Sick,” “Forced to Love,” “Ungrateful Little Father,” and “Water in Hell,” the remaining ten tracks flip through genres like a picture book, pausing only to pencil in the occasional instrumental, one of which (“Meet Me in the Basement,” with its huge strings and “guitarmonies”) elicits bigger goose bumps than some of the singalongs. Luckily, the endlessly creative and surprisingly fluid Forgiveness Rock Record dispels any notion of opportunism by sticking to what the group does best: crafting clever, ramshackle, occasionally soaring bedroom pop songs (listen close for sirens) in a big expensive studio. Between the commercial success of Leslie Feist and the myriad “Broken Social Scene Presents” solo outings, some feared that the Canadian supergroup’s next outing would be a lackluster collection of stitched-together notebook ramblings and half-hearted demos swept up from the studio floor of previous sessions. As the founding fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters of the "indie rock collective” phenomenon, Broken Social Scene sure have spread their seeds since their eponymous third album in 2005.
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