Broken Social Scene

I just can't get enough of this band. I take back all the mean things I ever said about Canada. As much as Sweden used to seem like the home of rock and roll, well, the hell with Sweden, I am all about the Canada now. More to follow. Meanwhile - a paean to Broken Social Scene.

I like the new self-titled album even more than I liked the first one. The first one - which at the time I thought was interesting and experimental - now sounds like a total top 40 chock fulla singles album compared to this one. The new one is a glorious sprawling mess. I mean that in the best possible way.

No point in picking out favorite tracks. I can't remember the titles of any of the songs anyway (OK, except "It's All Gonna Break"). If there are any comments on this post maybe I'll get into it there.

I had a similar experience with this CD that I had to Kid A. I listened to it once thinking, hmm, the last one was better, and with a mild feeling of disappointment put it aside. Only after playing it in the background and not paying a lot of attention to it did I realize, hey, that is a really good CD, just more complex than I was expecting. It's atmospheric ... in places ... and louder in others. The sounds are layered. Most of the time the vocals are multi-tracked and relatively low in the mix.

If you have read this far and don't own this CD, go get it.

There are a lot of people in this band. Check the linked wikipedia entry. (A side note that will be interesting only to me: I bought an album of Jason Collett's last year having no idea he was part of this band. Now I will have to dig it out and listen to it again.)

One of the members used to be in a punk band called L'Étranger. Pretty cool name for a band. I hope they came up with their band name before hearing The Cure's first single though. Albert Camus deserves better than Robert Smith gave him.

The last song - the aforementioned "It's All Gonna Break" - is an epic. It has some regrettable lyrics right at the beginning but oh my god what a great song. I read it described somewhere as "Bob Seger on LSD" which seems apt.