Broken Social Scene Turns 20

In which the social scene started to seem a lot more coherent.

In 2003, Broken Social Scene rocketed to underground stardom on the strength of a Pitchfork review. The sprawling Toronto musical unit, featuring members of bands like Metric, Feist, Stars, Apostle Of Hustle, and Do Make Say Think, had already been building up steam. A tour of the States had been booked, and a US distribution deal was in place. Yet with Ryan Schreiber's 9.2 Best New Music rave for their 2002 sophomore album You Forgot It In People, BSS became instant indie-rock royalty.

They deserved it. You Forgot It In People is the truth. The veteran Toronto music journalist and Broken Social Scene biographer Stuart Berman recently summed up the breathless evolution captured on the album: Whereas 2001 debut Feel Good Lost presented Broken Social Scene as "an ambient basement project" that made sense alongside Canadian post-rock greats like Do Make Say Think, under the influence of ambitious indie bands like the Hidden Cameras — with their ever-shifting army of band members and high-concept live shows — BSS became "this multi-headed rock orchestra."

Though You Forgot It In People began and ended with the kinds of flickering instrumentals that might have appeared on Feel Good Lost, in between those bookends, the album jumped from subgenre to subgenre with breathless abandon: the breakbeat noise-pop of "KC Accidental," the prestige muzak stunner "Pacific Theme," the aching holographic ballad "Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl," the string-laden swoon "Lover's Spit." Sometimes, as on the electrifying "Almost Crimes," the band charged full speed ahead, swapping multiple lead vocalists into the frame and then bringing their voices together for a top-of-the-lungs finale.

True to the band name, the record really did feel like the product of a disparate community coming together, building out a world that felt, as Schreiber put it, "sort of infinite." Listening to it in my portable CD player as I hauled ass across the college green, I knew I was bearing witness to singular greatness — a notion confirmed when I saw Broken Social Scene lay waste to New York's Bowery Ballroom at CMJ Music Marathon that fall, summoning the record's atmospheric power and glory and then some. Together, they had delivered a monument to the thrill of possibility — a proof text for indie rock's premise that anywhere in the world, a local scene might be nurturing works of boundary-pushing brilliance.

The self-titled follow-up, which arrived 20 years ago this Saturday, more closely resembled a rock band with an identity. BSS did not suddenly give up their taste for variety, but if You Forgot It In People played out almost like a compilation, Broken Social Scene edged closer to something like a signature sound. The tentpole tracks here boasted simple chord progressions blown out to the heavens by a wall of guitars, often buoyed by a brass section and a small army of vocalists. There were quiet songs, too, and like the loud ones they seemed to blurrily manifest from the ether, storms of emotion held together by the force of collective will. Self-identified "semi-leader" Kevin Drew called it "this big, beautiful mess," yet it felt streamlined compared to what came before.

I may be overselling the album's sense of steady familiarity. There was still an element of collage within the mirage, from the IDM-influenced breakbeats driving would-be title track "Windsurfing Nation" to the psychedelic soul vibes of "Hotel," one of the more startlingly sexy songs in this band's catalog. Like the albums before it, it's dotted with wordless, experimental interludes that serve as a reminder that Drew and co-founder Charles Spearin first bonded over a shared love of Tortoise. It may just be that the best, most memorable tracks are the ones that represent Broken Social Scene settling into a winning formula. There was a shagginess to songs like the howling mountain of sound "Ibi Dreams Of Pavement (A Better Half)," the cavernous expanse "It's All Gonna Break," and the glittering, propulsive "Fire Eye'd Boy." But they were also catchy and direct, poised to seize the opportunity afforded by indie rock hype at a time when such momentum could rocket a band to a sustainable music career. That a band like this one might break through to fame and fortune was a different sort of unknown horizon, exciting in its own way.

None were better suited for crossover success than "7/4 (Shoreline)." Despite the funny time signature written right into the title, it may be the most accessible Broken Social Scene song ever. The track has a relentless sense of forward momentum — grand-scale alt-rock that manages to be danceable without shoehorning in a "dance beat." It really does feel like you're cruising along the coast, perhaps in the sky, perhaps on the sea. The band expertly deploys its arsenal of vocalists, the Drew-led chorale giving way to soulful Leslie Feist verses that hit like soft lightning strikes. Gorgeous guitars keep piling up along the way, eventually infused with orchestral bombast, the sound of Chicago post-rock transmuted into a pop-rock anthem. By the end, the lot of them are howling, "It's coming, it's coming in hard," and they're right.

Moments like those are why I remember Broken Social Scene as a monolithic force — a sweeping, sophisticated indie rock tidal wave. Listening back to Broken Social Scene two decades later, that impression is reaffirmed. Yet watching the band's performance of "7/4 (Shoreline)" on Conan, I was struck by its quaintness. Its cuteness, even. Broken Social Scene were one of the first in a wave of 2000s indie bands with an absurdly large roster. They made ample use of horns and strings. Their band name was kind of silly. Yet somehow I never thought of them as blog-rock in league with all those precious, communal buzz bands of the post-Sufjan, post-Decemberists, post-Arcade Fire moment, maybe because their songs were often simply too epic to be twee.

The resemblance makes sense. Though hardly abandoning the quirks that defined this band's unique personality, Broken Social Scene found them moving a little closer to the middle, becoming less of an anomaly and more in step with the times. It's not an out-of-nowhere masterpiece on par with You Forgot It In People, just a very strong album that yielded a handful of all-time setlist fixtures before petering out near the end. Drew might argue that the fact Broken Social Scene were able to hold it together and come away with a body of work this strong is miraculous in its own way. "We weren't going for anything — this is what we did, we achieved it, showed how we can help each other and didn't let ourselves ruin it," he told NPR at the time. "There's been so many inner fights and inner twangs and everything and we're still here. So anything now that we do is just going to be more excitement. It can't be anything less."