![]() ![]() I can’t help but contrast my memories of BSS’s first London show with Arcade Fire’s own debut in the capital, where Win Butler’s eyes remained firmly focussed on a point a couple of hundred feet beyond the back wall of King’s College Student Union. It’s the record Broken Social Scene have always had within them, but perhaps never quite achieved. Which means that Hug of Thunder has to be awfully, awfully good to compete with people’s memories of You Forgot It In People or Forgiveness Rock Record. It’s almost never all about the music: pop is built on the thrill of the new, of the charge of excitement that enters a room when a band has not just great songs, but great buzz, a great story, an ineffable air of being something new and alien placed into one’s life just to add some sparkle. ![]() You might argue that this doesn’t matter, that it’s all about the music. The idea, now, that they might generate such excitement is, frankly, laughable, as you might have gathered from the lack of excited interviews appearing in the press in the run-up to this record. When they made their breakthrough in 2003, it was on the back of a rave review in Pitchfork for the album You Forgot It In People that made them one of the first beneficiaries of 'The Pitchfork Effect', in which they were propelled far beyond where they might otherwise have expected to land. It’s harder still when the seven years since your previous album have seen your style of music – and let’s not beat about the bush, BSS are an indie band – disappear from fashion. It was epic in all the right ways, and none of the wrong ones.īut it’s one thing to appear on a Sunday teatime in front of a festival crowd who are finally getting some sunshine after a bucketload of rain, playing your old favourites, another entirely to make a new album that manages to encapsulate your strengths, to remind people of what they loved in the first place, and still take them somewhere new. Again, they had just 60 minutes, and by the hour’s end, the crowd had swollen massively, drawn by euphoric brass fanfares and songs that communicated the very sense of what people go to music festivals for: one felt both alone with the music, and lost in the crowd at the same time. Leslie Feist singing ‘Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl’ that night was a quite staggering five minutes of live music.Īt End Of The Road we got the disciplined version of BSS. At their first London show, at the Barfly in Camden, early in 2003, given a slot of no more than an hour, they were simply brilliant, the very best of their songs presented concisely and with absolute definition. ![]() On the other hand, when forced into a little discipline, they could astound. Given free rein, they have been known to meander on and on – then on and on some more, before topping it all off by going on and on some more – and one show at the Astoria in London in 2006 springs to mind, a set so long and boring that Transport for London had knocked down the venue and started building the Crossrail station before the band even got to the encore. The Canadian group serve as the very definition of 'sprawling collective', with all the downsides that come with that tag. It was not without a certain trepidation that one awaited Broken Social Scene’s appearance at the End Of The Road festival last summer. ![]()
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