Broken Social Scene
Forgiveness Rock Record

4.5.

Dealing with the gray can provoke an innocent joy. Today I share the vision of the collective Broken Social Scene: it's as if the times of splattering anxiety are over. We're all a bit tired and down. There's froth left at our mouths, and we're cornered. Maybe that's why it's time to keep the gun in the pocket and not in hand. Today there’s a different way that goes beyond sarcasm or cruelty to discuss certain matters. We still have a chance to see ourselves anew, albeit dazed, but with a retina that radiates color. Dealing with the gray is a situation that makes you want to put a floral wallpaper patch, in honor of the good times, on paranoia. And it's also a moment that can activate the feeling of conscious and judicious revolt, where you devise a bombing device filling it with colorful paints. You leave the TNT to the Americans or the Taliban. There you go, perhaps not giving a damn and thinking a bit about yourself and the current cosmopolitanism that, especially through music, surely has something good and lively to tell. Indeed, we're talking about Canadians here. Ah, Toronto, Toronto! A livable, cohesive city, minus forty degrees when it feels like it, yet always feasible, visitable, usable, open, and functional. No queues, environments designed for humans, cultural fervor that today is a kind of miracle like a frame painted by Caravaggio. I assure you. It is the place of the BSS collective, and it's a city where, fortunately, you can grasp everything that moves in the tumultuous and multidisciplinary trends of planet earth. It is fertile ground for those who want to understand when the markets will finally collapse, to understand what will come after the post, to limit yourself to the present and live it fully, to hear drones crossing urban spaces or to see young bands riding the wave while young artists, in the same place, perform things truly never seen before. In Toronto, you can get an idea of free cinema and an idea of the most sincere art. Toronto is an excellent reference point for today's youth, too dumbed down to be truly young, and it is a fortune for those who practice and live it in recent times.

Forgiveness Rock Record is a persuasive and missionary album. A kind of reset point. What was, was; from today we give a fresh coat of green, yellow, red, and blue even to the decline. It seemed to me an injection of mature vigor, perhaps less extroverted, but of hope, of positivity addressed to us who wander between 20 and 40 looking for alternatives that, if they exist, manifest late in the evening after you’ve spent the whole day busting your back or head. FRR is a record that has understood a moment and puts itself forward. It's not didactic. It doesn't tell you that everything is crap and spits and pees on it. It's not gray. Forgiveness Rock Record is the Pantone catalog of serenity, rarely disturbed, and in a certain sense erected to a state of consciousness that we should all arm ourselves with, if we don't want to go crazy. Compared to screams, mathematics, noises, greed, FRR presents itself as a melodic record of pure and true alternative, without poses. I loved its art, combinatorial, reassuring, intelligent, which found an interesting way out from this flattening towards the bottom (in the sense of tones, moods, sounds) which lately seems to roam among so much music. A note: thanks to those who write on debaser, I haven't let some of the latest productions in the metal and neofolk field slip away (which I would otherwise have neglected, out of distrust) that literally petrified me for some interesting turns towards bright openings of genres submerged by much dark earth and stained with blood. Here, these still obtuse angles that are finally giving a little oxygen to music speak of the intelligence of certain artists who, in some cases—with my opinion—voluntarily and in others less, understood that it is precisely with their art they can try to emerge from a muddy stagnation which, frankly, has a bit pissed me off, to put it in Alcest’s terms.

Interpreters of a genre that is by definition free from constraints (by definition, perhaps, now only applicable to their music; the rest is a label) the Broken Social Scene in 2010 dedicate independent application and an attitude of always wanting to measure up to goals to be reached with shrewdness. They've been beaten a bit by everyone both in Italy and abroad, but with the usual hypocritical sufficiency. They are criticized for being weak, repetitive, and lacking in bite. I know that writing nonsense is a much different job than composing music, but let them try making music like this today. For those who know the previous albums, it's a bit like arriving already sated and drunk at the same table that has been feasted on many times. But there's still hunger and the desire to wet the throat. And one is not disappointed at all. Thin melodic lines, controlled electronic abrasions, ensemble work like politics doesn't even have an idea it’s being done, a searching of instruments and voices that seem to push each other and blossom gradually, each one a protagonist even in the overlaps and dismemberments of the score. One of my favorite voices of the moment and one song above all,World Sick, which introduces yet another journey full of meat (14 tracks) that doesn't reach the maximum only because it contains a couple of empty passages (track 4 comes to mind right now). For the rest, it's all brand, reliable, and guaranteed.

Broken Social Scene vs. Grey. The big band of today, a bit of Grand Funk Railroad of today, a bit children of tomorrow. In other words, great.