Broken Social Scene’s love-in at the Sound Academy last night was a wholly virtuous affair. A week prior to their two-night stand in Toronto, the homegrown indie-rock-collective-cum-philanthropists requested that all attendees bring with them at least one non-perishable food item for donation to the Daily Bread Food Bank.
Certainly, this was as much an act of holiday season-charity as it was a way for de facto band leaders Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning to finally live up to their Jesus-like appearances. (It’s been clear the band has had such beatific aspirations since Canning publicly chastised American gluttony with Christ-like wisdom in a recent interview.) The divine benevolence didn’t stop there; adhering to the precept “love thy indie-rock neighbour,” the band also welcomed with outstretched arms a multitude of special musical guests this evening.
But first, to quell any false hopes for a complete BSS roster (which, these days, is as rare as an Iraqi weapon of mass destruction), a disembodied voice announced that Emily Haines, Amy Millan, Evan Cranley or Leslie Feist would not be taking part in the evening’s festivities. Before the ensuing crowd whimpers could completely knock the evening’s energy off-kilter, the patron saints of Canadian indie-rock stalked on stage to a pope-worthy ovation.
They quickly capitalized on this gust of morale with the trance-inducing instrumental “Late Nineties Bedroom Rock for the Missionaries.” The song’s simple, plucked guitar and fluttering keyboard line collapsed into a sea of fuzz, only to segue into the sultry head-and-shoulders grind of “Shampoo Suicide” — a faithful replication of the way both songs mesh together on the band’s 2002 breakthrough You Forgot It In People. From there, the ADD-addled “KC Accidental” enchanted fans with its hyperactive scores of stop-start crescendos, which eventually simmered down to a dull violin-driven roar over which Drew sensitively crooned. In one fell swoop, the audience was sent reeling into a state of pseudo-religious ecstasy.
Of course, righteous as this multi-instrumented order of angels may be, the night was not without its narcissistic moments. Several times throughout the evening, individual members were given time to showcase work from their own ego-stroking solo projects. Canning lead a few numbers off of his recent debut release Something for All of Us, including the slick kamikaze-anthem “Hit The Wall” (see video below) and the uplifting, dance-infused canticle “Churches Under The Stairs.”
Drew also indulged in a couple tracks from his own 2007 release
Spirit If…, though he fared considerably worse than Canning, straining his vocal chords too sharply during “Farewell to the Pressure Kidz” and sounding downright spiritless during the U2-esque “Frightening Lives.” Even the less-revered disciples were allotted their own spurts of swollen-headedness; Apostle of Hustle’s Andrew Whiteman took lead vocal duties on “Looks Just Like The Sun,” while bassist Sam Goldberg lead a rendition of “Three Thousand Miles,” a Sabbath-style slow burner penned by his own defunct psych-pop outfit
Hawaii.
But perhaps most deserving of the limelight was Do Say Make Think’s Charles Spearin, who conducted a sonic experiment of sorts dubbed
The Happiness Project. While Spearin played an animated recording of an elderly Jamaican lady babbling about love and sunshine, saxophonist Leon Kingstone flawlessly mimicked the tonal variations in her speaking voice. (Yes, I too found it rather peculiar that Spearin took the credit while Kingstone performed all the strenuous labour, but I assume Spearin is the patent-owner of this so-called project.)
While the three sacred matriarchs of the Broken Social Commune were incognito, surrogate mothers Elizabeth Powell and Lisa Lobsinger filled the gynocentric shoes of the band with goddess-like grace and authority. Taking dual-leads on “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl,” they brought more innocuous adolescent candor to the melody than Emily Haines could have possibly mewed on her daintiest of days. On “Been At It So Long” off of
Something for All of Us, they emitted seraphic tones nearly impossible to achieve through mortal larynxes. On “7/4 (shoreline),” Powell brought her own
Chrissie-Hynde-meets-
Corin-Tucker flavour to (
apparently ex-member) Feist’s vocal arrangements. Powell, whose straight-up rock n’ roll trio Land of Talk played a set rawer than a mound of steak tartare earlier in the evening, has been acting as a guest vocalist/guitarist/maraca player while her band accompanies BSS on their current North American tour.
As mentioned previously, the special guests were legion. Those hitching a ride on the BSS bandwagon included Weakerthans percussionist Jason Tait, Metric guitarist James Shaw and on-again-off-again member Jason Collett. Then, in an unexpected curveball, the band introduced to the stage a special out-of-town visitor: the right-honourable Mr. Isaac Brock (the Modest Mouse vocalist, silly, not the
British General). Wasting no time to chit-chat, the eccentric, death-obsessed front man lead the collective through whirling renditions of Mouse classics “
The Good Times Are Killing Me” and “
Paper Thin Walls.” And no, fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your taste) Brock
did not mutilate himself at this gig.
While our favourite polyphonic crusaders are as ethically minded as any, it would be dishonest to say there was not the occasional bite from the forbidden apple. For the sensuous samba of his solo number “Love Is New,” Brendan Canning — Christ-like semblance and all — strutted onto stage wearing nothing but a shiny, metallic robe. He proceeded to gently seduce us in an amplified sex throb that saw him cavort about with the company of curvaceous female backup dancers. Sexification personified.
Such is the kitchen-sink approach of Broken Social Scene, the Great White North’s erudite emissaries of orgasmic noise. They make us laugh, they make us cry, they urge us to love one another, they leave us crotch-raw and exhausted. From the 13-person wall of cascading sound that was “It’s All Gonna Break” to the unchained abandon and camaraderie of the evening’s closer, “Major Label Debut (Fast),” this was a sublime ordeal that left attendants dazed and fomented, as if they were born-again Christians that had just witnessed
a Benny Hinn summit. At the end of the night, giant balloons fell from the ceiling – a triumphant celebration of the saccharine sounds this ever-expanding outfit work like bees in a hive to produce. And we, the connoisseurs of their nocturnal honey, were left full-bellied and diabetic. Our cups runneth over.
Broken Social Scene play The Sound Academy (11 Polson) tonight (Nov. 28) with guests The Beauties.