It contains a warm, haunting quality that feeds the repetitious nature of the song's minimal lyrics like a familiar ghost singing lullabies from an AM radio. The song features Metric's Emily Haines as the vocalist, and her voice was clearly meant for this song. The song "Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl" is perfect example. Repetition tends to work best with electronic music, and while the foundations of the Broken Social Scene's music lie in Canadian folk, its melodies hold the structure of an electronic track in a fashion that wouldn't sound alien on a Postal Service album. There is a subtle art to repetition that walks the razor-thin line of maintaining the song versus beating the listener over the head with words. But Broken Social Scene's intuitive approach to constructing songs serves as the group's fingerprint, despite the assortment of sounds. With this many creative forces working together and with the variety of sounds, vocalists and styles at work, the fact that each song has a distinctly original flavor is an achievement itself. Comprising 19 contributors from about 15 different bands, Broken Social Scene audaciously displays a musical diversity such that it gives its albums a quality similar to an intimate mix tape. Sounds like? Broken Social Scene isn't so much a band as a musical collective. It was a good complement to the emphatic, unwieldy strategies of Broken Social Scene, and in some ways it was preferable.Who? An experimental supergroup from Toronto. It also emphasized the immediacy of her songs: on “Death by Fire,” a propulsive rock tune, and “It’s Okay,” a muted ballad, she made a virtue of directness and brevity, letting small details speak for themselves. The sparseness of the setting, with just bass and drums behind her, underscored her composure. Opening the show with her fast-emerging band Land of Talk, she proved herself a strong guitarist and a calmly arresting lead singer. Then she sang “Anthems for a 17-Year-Old Girl,” inhabiting a part originated by Emily Haines.įor those in the crowd who had arrived early enough, Ms. Powell had stood in for Feist on “7/4 (Shoreline),” a dreamy salvo named after its time signature. “She’s brought us back to life.” He didn’t say why the band had needed the jolt Too much touring? Too many shift rotations? but his acknowledgment was duly noted. “One of the great things that’s happened to us lately is this girl Liz Powell,” he said, referring to a newer member of the fold. The guitarist Andrew Whiteman took more license, paring the musical entourage down to three pieces for “National Anthem of Nowhere,” a signature theme of his side project, Apostle of Hustle. Drew, who have each released albums in the last year, the results sounded, well, like Broken Social Scene. Here that flexibility extended to the set list, drawing from solo material by various band members. Drew but also to the bassist Brendan Canning and a host of others, notably (but not currently) including Feist. Even the center of gravity in the group is an unstable proposition, with eight or more people usually flailing about onstage and vocal duties falling not only to Mr. Indeterminacy has always suited Broken Social Scene, a Toronto indie-rock band known for its large pool of collaborators and a soaring, hazily layered sound. Whether because of coyness or confusion, the show was a sprawl of false endings and farewells. Drew pledged would not be back for a while. Their uncertainty affected many of the songs, which seemed to buckle, only to rear up again it also applied to the band itself, which Mr. But he and the rotating cast onstage often seemed vague about just where that was. Kevin Drew, a founder of Broken Social Scene, kept looking toward the finish line during the band’s sold-out CMJ Music Marathon show at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple on Friday night.
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