Broken Social Scene

Roseland Ballroom - November 11, 2005

Live Review by Michael Byrne

With every canister of film that Broken Social Scene drops off at the Arts + Crafts lab, the camera settings change: the exposure lengthens and the aperture narrows. The scenes are the same: the bustles of melody, the jostling of crowded arrangements, the random orders of so many speaking at once spliced together into near coherency or something far beyond it. In these pictures that try so hard to incorporate everything that reflects music, that hold open the studio ear for almost too long with almost too much, there’s always the threat of meaningless blur, that we’ll turn cross-eyed looking for a point of reference.

That threat could never seem so real as when the whole band is on a stage ten feet before those crossing-eyes, when there are four guitars, two drum kits, a bass, a violin, a keyboard, and a cross-stage line of microphones, none of which cool for much longer than a song. It’s ecology. But, being in cue (to speak little of calling those cues) in such madness isn’t instinct, it’s virtuosity (it’s Leslie Feist vaulting a drum kit to reach a microphone just in time for her backing vocals on “Cause=Time.”). It’s calling multiple points of reference, draping us in musical blur, yet never threatening us with the gray broth that plagued the In The Fishtank indie-collaborations. Rather, Broken Social Scene’s music evokes something similar to Michael Wesely’s three-year exposures of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s construction. Three years of work for a three photograph exhibition. It succeeded in that same way this band succeeds, with a defined narrative that allows the music/image to either use or shed those implied extraneous bits. In both projects, the success is the proximity to chaos without falling into it.

The Fishtank collaborations were fusions in the crudest sense. Broken Social Scene–despite being comprised of x members of x bands (currently including two personal favorites)–is a singular rock band that’s one pop microgram away from reaching the indie breakouts of Death Cab for Cutie or Modest Mouse. When the band did a synchronized high kick on opener “KC Accidental,” it was barely a joke, a fitting opener for a band that’s been drinking wine in the smoldering dining room of the burning house of the aforementioned bands since BSS first howled “And they all want to fuck the cause!”

When that house has finished burning, (go ahead and slice my throat for it) when Death Cab and Modest Mouse have become classic rock ashes, Broken Social Scene will be having that last glass and finally gaze into the smoke clear sky. This is a band with many directions to follow, as if they haven’t already (from the unapologetic pop of “Lovers Spit” and “Major Label Debut” to the electronics of “Ambulance for the Ambience” to the synth funk of “Swimmers.”) There are few bands playing these days that could unironically end a show with the grandiose brass climax of “Handjobs for the Holidays,” but after a triple set of lessons on every direction indie-pop can travel, and after electrocuting Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock during their first encore (slice my throat again for reveling in the symbolism), we should have expected nothing else.