Broken Social Scene
Broken Social Scene

THE REVIEW

Whirling sound worlds and basic broad-stroke fantasy where you end up looking closer, noticing a thousand shades between orange and red. One color, more colors. A distillation of deconstructed and reinvented alt-rock, continuously traversed by an extraordinary emotional tension made of melodic passages as unapproachable as they are seductive, for a record rich in nuances, of small overlapping sounds, details that appear to the ear slightly delayed, blended as they are with the rest of the musical structure. More colors, one color.

The Broken Social Scene are a group of guys from Toronto and this self-titled work is actually their third record after two official releases and a collection of unreleased tracks that quickly established them as a "new invention" in the world of alternative rock. Inventions they may know little about, but they certainly know how to play divinely. And rather than just playing, they seem to blend, melt, and mix sounds. In a very sweet mixture that reminds everyone (many) and no one. The Sonic Youth of the golden period ("Sister", "Evol") completely dried of feedback, hums, and screeches for metropolitan angst, but navigated towards the essential, the core of a sparse and enveloping melody, almost Bacharach-like, built as it is on soft interludes and stunning choruses. They are the Pixies of a Sunday morning, dozing in the warmth of blankets struck by sunlight filtering through the windows.
Horns orchestrating almost in the distance, their fanfare rising and falling and dissipating inside millions of guitars scattered in every corner, ready to chase each other like waves in the sea and the bass always in the foreground, moving, shifting and coloring the background marked by the strong and precise pulsations of the drums.

That tone in playing, askew, sexy, vaguely à la... Pixies that peek into the Tortoise repertoire and then veer towards an experimentation on the juxtaposition of sound microstructures that makes you think of Jaga Jazzist but with the addition of vocals. Vocals. And perhaps the strength of BSS in this very successful record is precisely this: a research on the alternation and interpenetration between male and female voice that overturns the very concept of "singing" in pop-rock and aims to use vocal timbres as counterparts and not as the 'end point' of instrumental sound.

A beautiful record. Truly beautiful. For this its ingenious voluptuousness made of soft atmospheres punctuated by strong and cutting rhythms, it becomes impossible not to associate it with "splendid things", on the emotional level of one's experiences.