For a rock band, being a so-called “critical darling” generally means you’re doing something right. Broken Social Scene, a fluctuating 10 to 15-member experimental pop collective from Toronto, is the sort of critical darling that, until now, has tended to land on music writers’ year-end best album lists but not in the CD players of the average music listener. With last year’s phenomenal You Forgot It In People gaining more mainstream press attention, bassist and founding member Brendan Canning has “no complaints. It’s good for business,” he said.
The label of “experimental pop collective” is really the proper way to describe Broken Social Scene. Over the course of You Forgot It In People, the band jumps between pop rock, indie rock, ambient electronic, folk, ballads and even kitschy ‘60s orchestral pop. The result is a far cry from the band’s recently reissued first album, Feel Good Lost, and Bee Hives, a compilation of B-sides and leftovers. Canning attributes this change to “being a band, as opposed to … [sitting around from] midnight to 8 am, popping trucker speed and making ambient tracks.”
In terms of influences, Canning cites Dinosaur Jr, My Bloody Valentine and Radiohead, all of whom share Broken Social Scene’s affinity for complex arrangements and experimental elements reworked into pop music.
Since Feel Good Lost, when Broken Social Scene was simply Canning and long-time friend Kevin Drew, the band has gained members and morphed into an unwieldy but thrilling on-stage circus. The much larger group, who played a sold-out show at the Black Cat last week, has diversified the band’s sound.
The touring lineup is “not the biggest size it’s been, but a reasonable one to take on the road,” said Canning. He added that, “they’re all people we’ve played with over the years.” All the members are drawn from various bands of the up-and-coming but as of yet unexploited Toronto music scene.
In Canning’s opinion, “People are taking notice because there are probably better bands in Toronto than anywhere else these days.” The scene contains bands as diverse as post-rock mainstays Do Make Say Think (some of whom are in BSS), saccharine pop outfit Stars (all of whom are in BSS) and gritty post-punk rockers The Constantines (completely unaffiliated with BSS, but still great).
As the breakthrough flagship of the Toronto scene, there’s been great interest in a follow-up to You Forgot It In People. Canning said that “we were hoping to get it out by November, but we’ve got a pretty extensive touring schedule until July.” As far as the future is concerned, he said that the band would like to branch out into soundtrack work and tour less.
Such a fate would be somewhat disappointing, given the mesmerizing live show the band puts on, but in the end, this writer, like his colleagues, will probably gobble up whatever the band puts out. Hopefully Broken Social Scene’s appeal will extend to the music-listening public as soon as they get a real taste of the band; they’re too good to be forgotten.
