I am a bad American, or at least a bad GW student. Tuesday night, when I should have been at home glued to my television in hopes of finding out who will be shaping the free world for the foreseeable future, I went to 9:30 Club to check out the sold-out Broken Social Scene show. And yes, in case you were wondering, Broken Social Scene is Canadian. I might as well have set an American flag on fire using kittens as matches.
As members of the Arts and Crafts collective wandered on stage, I found myself saying out-loud, “Wow, there are only ten of them on stage right now,” which is not usually a statement uttered in rock clubs, that domain of the four man band. Broken Social Scene is no ordinary band, though. An entire universe revolving around singer Kevin Drew, a Broken Social Scene show involves people wandering on and off stage as sounds are needed, and it all appears so chaotic that one kind of can’t believe the songs that are produced are so beautiful. The progenitors of headphone masterpieces like 2002’s You Forgot It In People and last years eponymous LP, it’s absolutely shocking that the million different things that go on at any one time on tape can be reproduced on stage, but by the end of first song “Lover’s Spit,” everyone was a true believer. Guitars collide with the rhythm section like anywhere else, but the MVP here was the on-again-off-again brass section, with trumpets and trombones filling out the atmospherics wonderfully. Saxophones, tambourines, and maracas filled out the stage.
When they’re on, Broken Social Scene can make a claim at being the most compelling live band in the world. Singers cycle in and out and no one misses a beat as the cacophony finds form and beauty among the mess. Broken Social Scene rode this teetering edge for about an hour and a half on Tuesday night.
Unfortunately, they played for just over two hours.
Toward the end of the set, the band got indulgent, musically rambly, and quite frankly boring, which is never a word I’d expect to use to describe a band with a double digit membership on stage. The most energy the band managed to conjure during the tail end of their set came not from their music, but rather from their on-stage announcement that the Dems had taken back the House. They still managed to entertain-partially through cheekily addressing the rumors of their impending break-up, with Drew apologizing for the messiness of a song by saying “we don’t even do soundchecks together anymore, that’s what it’s come to”-but their lows disappointed, especially when their highs, like “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” (stunning even without star songbirds Amy Millan or Emily Haines) attained such great heights. Broken Social Scene is living proof that sometimes more is more, but Tuesday night’s show is a reminder that sometimes more is less, too.
