“We’re gonna do what we’ve been doing the past 20 years and have fun!” Drew said to the crowd, honoring the duration the band has been together playing music. They opened with “Pacific Theme,” a song they had played as a show opener “many years ago” at The Fonda.

“We hope you get married to it, we hope you get divorced to it…” Drew said as he dedicated the song to the crowd. The set culminated in a thoughtful dedication of “Lover’s Spit” to a crowd member who said they were going to walk down the aisle and get married to the song. The nearly two-hour performance ended with a euphoric moment as singer and founding member Kevin Drew asked everyone to tap into their emotions and let out a loud, long scream. The first show of Broken Social Scene’s three-day run at The Fonda had fans dancing and screaming into the start of the next day. This record of satisfying songs and memories, is one more lesson from the imitable band: if you bake enough bread for the people, even the crumbs left over will be enough for another meal.Broken Social Scene main page Broken Social Scene Live at The Fonda, Los Angeles Knowing them, they’ll probably tour this record as well, and draw from whatever members are available at the time. “All my friends in magazines / Got addicted to the word “leave” / And they all wrote songs that they believe / Little lies and massive dreams,” they sing on the twelfth track, “All My Friends.” “And they request that you slow it down.” This album is a chance for the BSS crew to “slow it down” while looking back at their impressive track record of productivity and creativity. It is their thing, after all, to take everything from everywhere and boil it down into something digestible to the ears and heart, to speak to our disillusionment or our grand hopes, with triumphant song.

Tracks like the demo for The Apostles of Hustle’s “National Anthem of Nowhere,” give a little behind the scenes look, and while the album is less polished than their more proper recording, it shines pretty bright nonetheless.

The album plays on the dynamics of loud to quiet, straight forward to abstract, raw to polished. The same way there might be a buzz about B-sides from the likes of David Bowie or Arcade Fire, this album is big news in an indie world who’s entire modern ethos has derived so much from this pivotal band. America” and “All My Friends,” this album acts like a magnet, drawing their expanding power back to a hot, central core. They’ve had such a meteoric effect on indie rock, and collective artistic experience, it is once again a how-to of indie rock, to see this collection of recycled songs from every stage in their lengthy career.įrom outtakes of their album Forgiveness Rock Record, like “This House on Fire” and “Golden Facelift,” which deal with the modern quandary with passion and pity, to tracks off their 2004 EP, EP to Be You and Me, like “Canada vs. As talented artists as they are, every track on their b-sides rivals main tracks on other indie rock artists’ albums. Broken Social Scene is already an eclectic bunch, with their experimental, mish-mosh, baroque indie sound, so it’s not strange at all for an album like this from them to work.

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