Broken Social Scene - You Forgot It In People

I'm gonna throw a little indie rock against the wall and see if it sticks. I know, I know... a lots been written about these folks. I haven't read it. I hear about a lot of individual talent contained herein so, for what it's worth, these folks deserve cred for making a quality collaboration where most get bogged down in cock fights. Oh wait... that's the New Pornographers ... Canadiens. Easy mistake.

There's some Sonic Youth here but with a dingle ball fringe... maybe a little slice of ambient and some overdisclosure wrapped in a pancetta of drummingdrumming / hautiness / lubricant / loneliness / ecstasy / recovery. Lots of forks in the pie. Named one of the 50 greatest Canadian albums ever (I prolly shouldn't have said that since 25 of the 50 were Rush records - I KEED!).

"Looks Just Like the Sun" and "I'm Still Your Fag" just take you and put you in your stupid place.





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from Pitchforkmedia: ...no one wants to admit that they like a band that goes around calling themselves this-- a band who, judging from their artwork, stands around all day looking pensive, crouching, and feeling the music in dramatic grayscale, a band that finds its home on Arts & Crafts/Paper Bag Records, who puts the message "break all codes" above their own barcode, and who dedicates their album to their "families, friends and loves." I already had them pegged! How could they not be the most unimaginative, bleak, whiny emo bastards in the whole pile?

I don't know. But this disc is nothing like you'd imagine. Not even almost. I've been over it again and again looking for some cause, some reason, anything, that would compel a band with this much unfiltered creativity and kinetic energy-- a band without even the slightest suggestion of tear-stained poetry or bedroom catharsis-- to fall victim to the worst possible Vagrant Records clichés. I can't find it. All I know is that when I press play, and this disc whirrs to life, it inexplicably sheds its crybaby façade and becomes... sort of infinite.

I've been listening to this disc for months on repeat-- sometimes just this disc for days-- but it wasn't until I began doing research for this review that it began to make sense how a band like this could materialize from out of nowhere with such a powerful and affecting album. I knew from the liners that the group has ten members (fifteen if you include guests); what I didn't know was that all of them have been wandering from band to band within the wildly experimental Toronto music scene for years, or that they all came together from groups like Stars, Do Make Say Think, Treble Charger, A Silver Mt. Zion, and Mascott with the unified goal of making, of all things, pop music. One of its members told a Toronto weekly that "we'd already made our art-house albums... the whole ideology of trying to write an actual four-minute pop song was completely new to so many of us."

Who could have imagined it would come so easily? You Forgot It in People explodes with song after song of endlessly replayable, perfect pop. For proof, pick virtually any track: the sound barrier-bursting anthem "Almost Crimes", the subdued, gossamer "Looks Just like the Sun", the Dinosaur Jr.-tinted "Cause = Time", or the shimmering, Jeff Buckley-esque "Lover's Spit". And there's plenty more where that came from. How about the chugging guitar-pop of "Stars and Sons", which spins a distant, churning keyboard drone beneath the best moments of Spoon's Girls Can Tell and punctuates it with a barrage of percussive handclaps. Or "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl" which showcases Emily Haines' melting alto caught in a beautiful, cyclical refrain and intensely modified by vocal effects while violins float atop subtle banjo plucking and cascading toms. Or "KC Accidental", which blasts searing, super-melodic guitar, a drumkit alternately galloping and relentlessly beaten, and an impenetrable wall of accelerating orchestration, before crash-landing into a deliquescent pop lullaby.

Hear