![]() ![]() BSS has forged what one critic called "endlessly replayable, perfect pop" out of musical sources that couldn't be more disparate. People with their hearts on their sleeves." If it all sounds hopelessly earnest - another emo band bent on saving one little corner of the world - it isn't, or not quite. "The whole band is based on people who are closely connected, metaphysically. "We made a lot of decisions to help ourselves be grounded," Drew explained to me. The second album, "You Forgot It in People," is dedicated to "friends, families and loves." Broken Social Scene is Toronto's Nirvana, without - so far - the troubled-rock-star antics or the anomie and with a social agenda that puts collective music making above individual success. Musically, you could say that Toronto has become a nicer but less aesthetically coherent version of Seattle in the early days of grunge. The musicians play on one another's CD's (BSS can have between 9 and 17 musicians on a given track depending on who shows up or what's needed for a particular song), a level of cooperation and organization unusual in any popular-music scene, even one that might be summed up by the slogan above the bar code on BSS's most recent CD: "break all codes." Perhaps it helps - or maybe it hurts - that a few of them have also slept together, though the BSS'ers tend to be secretive about whom, when and why. The very name connotes what all the artists on the label have in common: they are lo-fi, heartfelt, ironic, makeshift and as tightly interlinked as the kids in a summer-camp lanyard-making session. It's more like a network, or, as Emily Haines, a sometime BSS'er and lead singer of the Toronto band Metric, put it, "somewhere between a tribe and a cult." Most of the members of BSS are also members of other bands that are released by Arts & Crafts. ![]() ![]() To call BSS a "band" is to simplify matters drastically. It was the first local show of Broken Social Scene's three-month world tour. A co-owner of the band's three-year-old label, Arts & Crafts, Jeffrey Remedios, was keeping up morale, checking in with the various musicians who make up the band and murmuring how great their individual work was. Her own chanteusey album, "Let It Die," had just gone gold in Canada and Europe.Įveryone was jammed together in the windowless, cluttered basement of an Ontario college auditorium, as band members stretched out or kneaded one another's backs or just sat drinking beers in chairs. Sliding closer to Canning, the band's soft-faced drummer, Justin Peroff, gave him an assist, as Leslie Feist, an occasional singer with BSS, brushed past. Nearby stood her boyfriend, Brendan Canning, who founded Broken Social Scene with Drew, his strawberry blond hair dangling toward the floor as he tried to touch his toes. A woman in silver boots briefly massaged his shoulders. He was clad, as usual, in baggy jeans, a moth-eaten black sweater and torn-up sneakers, a dime-store diamond on his pinkie. Ten minutes before Broken Social Scene was due to go onstage, Kevin Drew, co-founder and lead singer of the Toronto band, had his hands up on the wall. ![]()
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