The guitars slowly begin to strum, coaxing themselves out of hiding. A mandolin seems to arise, only to be pushed aside by the rubbery-thick bass guitar. Instruments keep coming, adding cascading lines that nearly get lost in the haze of competing melodies. Horns and whispers adorn the furthest reaches while a tambourine evolves into a rush of auto-fire drums and cymbal wash; then the mass of noises rise and climax into a dizzying, triumphant mess. With post-coital delicacy, all but the beat drops away, and the instruments slowly return: the bass, the acoustics, the backwards guitars, horns and finger drums, one after the next, and then fade away, as if they were merely dreamt.
The instruments on Broken Social Scene’s new self-titled album don’t quite play together, but flow into place, mimicking the vocals that seem to take ages to prop themselves into place. Beauty isn’t lost in the disorder, but is accentuated by it. The barely recognizable individuals — the variously distorted guitars, occasional strings, stylish horns, harp-like chimes, morbidly obese bass, whispered chants and triumphant screams — rise and combine to form something oppressively majestic, the sonic equivalent of an Almighty-led rain of boulders from the heavens.
The 17 (at last count) members of Broken Social Scene are heroes in their homeland, and for good reason. Part music collective, part super-group, much of the constantly growing cast is composed of already established Toronto musicians (see Metric, Apostle of Hustle, Stars, Feist), always ready to lend a hand to their town’s homegrown indie-rock symphony. The name is not accidental; when Broken Social Scene performs, it is as if the entire music scene of Toronto is playing the same song at once, blasting out of every club and dive bar in the city. The layers upon layers of indiscriminate guitars and murmuring vocals sound organic, like each member writing and playing on their own as part of a collective.
The group’s third album brings to life the collaborative insanity implied by the group’s nature. There’s the echoey Edge impersonator (no doubt with a Bono counterpart), someone playing the Stooges’ fuzz-stomp, a Joni Mitchell-ite (they are Canadian), a wannabe J. Mascis (of ’80s alterna-heroes Dinosaur Jr.), a wannabe Springsteen, and more than one of the indie-rock type, more interested in tweaking the feedback drone of their Fender amp than shaving regularly. The group exists in a swirling opaque fog, layering so many living instruments above one another that they remain unrecognizable and familiar, momentarily revealing a wail or a whisper, and always swinging to the chameleonic beat, which machine-guns along to its own (usually) swift metronome. By comparison, 2002’s top-notch You Forgot It In People sounds almost skeletal.
Broken Social Scene can easily exist as a single mood, firmly planted in the intersection between overambitious indie-rock and stony jamming. The often-vague melodies can transform the multifaceted playing into a muddled bouquet of noise, but as the insistent drumming and fuzzy, flabby bass constantly remind, there are songs on this jigsaw masterpiece, and damn good ones.
