Do you remember the cover for Broken Social Scene’s breakthrough album, You Forgot It In People? Basically it was a bunch of faceless musicians, silhouetted against a blank backdrop with guitars slung – the middle of a jam session.
Welcome to the Broken Social Scene live show – a lot of dudes on stage playing slight variations on rhythm guitar with a heaping of atmosphere. When it works, it works: at last night’s State Theatre show, “Cause=Time” locked into a bass-heavy groove with all the guitarists kind of teasing around the edge of the melody. It was just enough messing around to feel chaotic without coming wholly off the track. They hit this high point a few other times too, most notably on “7/4 (Shoreline)”, where the main hook started out in the titular drum part before getting taken over by a bold two-person horn section at the end, and, of course, the always riveting “Ibi Dreams of Pavement” from the band’s last full-length which closed the set-proper. During it, de facto band-leader Kevin Drew got the entire crowd to scream – “not for us, for you” – on the count of three, just as the band came back from their rumbling breakdown. It was a rare, exhilarating moment of audience participation, and undoubtedly capped off the night with the set’s biggest highlight.
The only problem was that these peaks were too few and far between. The band may be ostensibly touring around the release of Brendan Canning’s Broken Social Scene Presents…Something for All of Us…, but the selections they played from it were dull, with his voice lacking, including a reggae-toned jam that stole right from the Ratdog playbook. Ditto guitarist Sam Goldberg’s one contribution, a piece of R&B-tinged sludge during which the audience was encouraged to “rub up against each other.” The crowd didn’t really need the encouragement — the band’s lively, noisy jams were, at their best, enough to work a Falls Church Wednesday night crowd into a pretty damn good frenzy. Sprinkle in a few instrumentals, and the band did a pretty good job of testing your patience over the course of the night. But, in true BSS fashion, the night’s oddest moment – Do Make Say Think’s Charlie Spearin tape-recording his neighbor’s ruminations on love, splicing them, then playing them back with Leon Kingstone matching the woman’s voice on saxophone – proved to be three, four, maybe even five times more interesting than you’d expect. Go figure.
