Broken Social Scene
You Forgot It In People
Arts & Crafts/Paper Bag/Outside
If any recent Canadian music deserves wider exposure south of the 49th Parallel,
it is Toronto's Broken Social Scene. As if patiently awaiting some kind of ripple effect,
this revolving collective of indie scenesters founded by Kevin Drew (KC Accidental)
and Brendan Canning (ex-By Divine Right) — and featuring members of, variously, Stars,
Do Make Say Think, Treble Charger, A Silver Mt. Zion, Mascott, Godspeed You Black Emperor!,
Feist, Royal City, Change of Heart, Bourbon Tabernacle Choir, Raising the Fawn, hHead,
Peaches and Metric — has quite unobtrusively dropped two fine sleeper records into the fray.
Considering the line-up, You Forgot It In People, the band's late 2002 follow-up to 2001's Feel Good Lost
(in Canada, anyway), should be a Tower of Babel, but its sounds reach the Promised Land.
What ought to sound like a mishmash of elements
thrown against the proverbial wall —
saccharine pop, downtempo grooves, orchestral jams or drone-rock dub — instead meshes into a recognizable whole. This is good, solid pop music, engaging the head, the gut and that
annoying voice you sing along in when you think no one's listening. In between the subtle opener, "Capture the Flag" — all Dark Side-era Floydian
restless ambience like a city waking up reluctantly into a Taxi Driver half-world — and
the truncated closer, "Pitter Patter Goes My Heart," dances an array of beats, bleeps, balls, brass and bliss.
By the second track, "KC Accidental," all merry hell breaks loose before the hooks set into
the warm New Order grooves of "Stars and Sons."
The eclectic energy of these starters slows into "Looks Just Like the Sun,"
rambling like Jeff Tweedy's distant
frail cousin over affable beats, until "Pacific Theme" arrives with mutant genius.
A kind of alternate-reality merging of early Factory Records
bass-led melodicism, elevator muzak,
samba rhythms, arcade game sound effects and Bacharach horns, this is the mother of all
accidental mashups.
You Forgot It In People's evident enthusiasm counters any suspicions of indie-ironic
pretense. Side One's final song (uh-huh, there are two official "sides" of the CD),
"Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl," is a case in point. Drenched in vocal effects, featuring
violin and banjo over cascading toms, Metric's Emily Haines teases out all the
suffocating peer-dependent loneliness of teenage-girlhood, capturing a kind of heartbreaking
solipsistic neediness. "Used to be one of the rotten ones/ And I liked you for that/ Now you're all
gone got your makeup on/ And you're not coming back" begins the song's incantation of
guileless adolescent sorrows.
The second side ripens with the fertility and accessibility of these sonic gardens. On first listen,
"Cause = Time" sounds like a slightly more urgent version of the Smashing Pumpkins' mid-tempo rocker
"1979,"
until the prickly eroticism at its heart suddenly blooms front-and-center; breathy
vocals and strangely graphic lyrics ("we all wanna fuck the cause") add a nonchalant aura of
disquiet. "Late Nineties Bedroom Rock for the Missionaries" encapsulates the
multiple personality
disorder of the entire album in thumbnail version, plundering a multitude of musical styles. And finally,
the ostensibly indifferent "I'm Still Your Fag" — with its intricate drum shuffle and
folk-style guitar pickings — hides a world of defiant hurt; never overt, but echoed by
its gentle trombone coda that seems to take forever to fade — as if, like a rejected lover,
it simply refuses to go away.
And these are merely descriptions of the songs. They are only
as good as this individual writer's dubious skill at dancing about this particular architecture
(or so the analogy goes). The songs themselves are danceable, listenable, deft, joyful and sorrowful.
I mean, I'm lucky, I live
in Canada: a March 2003 re-release corrected an all-too-quickly out-of-print October 2002 batch.
Memo to BSS, however: Good call in launching this record into that sprawling market to the south
(I checked, and, mercifully, plans are afoot — expect a June 3 release via
Caroline Distribution).
Maybe those folks will be less
distracted by then, but honestly, such a marriage of joy and melancholy might even shake something
loose down there. Who knows? As it is, and at the very least, it really doesn't seem all that
strange to sing and dance right now, even if it is with tears running down our faces.
— David Antrobus (digitalis@shaw.ca)
