Wednesday, November 19, 2008
The Spin The Spin: Broken Social Scene at Cannery
Posted by The Spin on Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 12:11 PM
We arrived at Cannery Ballroom Tuesday night to the warm, welcoming glow of corporate infiltration: The folks from Toyota were pimping some new, tricked-out model and doling out silkscreened T-shirts with a Rock Band set-up in the back of one of their cars. As hilarious as it was to watch noobs drumming along to Descendents, the bitter cold only allowed us time to scoff at a verse or two before filing into the venue.
After a bit of a clusterfuck at will call, we entered the Ballroom as Land of Talk started their set. While Broken Social Scene has a habit of touring with their transient members’ less-than-impressive BSS mini-clone side projects, the Montreal three-piece immediately won us over. They covered quite a bit of space for a pop-savvy, punkish trio, and the groove was airtight.
We’re not sure if getting their water broken had anything to do with it, but Cannery certainly seems to be stepping up their sound as of late. We would have liked to hear a bit more of Land of Talk guitarist/lead singer Elizabeth Powell’s jagged, impressive playing and crystalline vocals, but we were just psyched to feel some thumping low-end, and when Broken Social Scene’s saxophonist Leon Kingstone joined in for a bit of trippy blowing on one of their more slowly-building balladesque tunes, we totally got into it.
(Side note: Apparently Canadian indie supergroups are pretty popular amongst the gargantuan set. Look, tall dudes: We ache for the plight of men 6’ 3” and up, but you’ve got to post up by a speaker or a column or something, because you totally harshed our buzz with your Big Bird swaying and lanky, gouging elbows. We even noticed sidelined Titan Rien Long amongst the hip-shaking tall-boys.)
As tough as it is for any band with nearly a dozen members—about half of them guitar players—to get a good mix, BSS sounded fucking phenomenal. And as soon as Canuck-rock’s answer to Wu-Tang started in on the intro to “7/4 (Shoreline)” from their eponymous LP, we realized the lineup they’re working with is totally passable, and Powell’s vocals almost made us forget all about Emily Haines and Leslie Feist. Almost.
It seems each time Broken Social Scene pass through Tennessee, the pubescent, dancing hipsters get fewer and fewer. Maybe they’re getting older. Maybe we’re getting older. Either way, we skipped out on the upstairs after-party featuring the Nerq Twins and Kindercastle because we were pretty pleased with having BSS’s “Fire Eye'd Boy” stuck in our heads and didn’t want to risk replacing it.
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This is the South, Toby. If you can see your breath, it's bitter for us. What's the natural climate for gnomes?
Did they do mainly the band stuff or did they throw in the solo Brendan Canning, Kevin Drew,etc. stuff, spin writer?
They mostly did material off of s/t, You Forgot it in People, and I believe even a few off Beehives. They didn't play much we weren't familiar with, so (while we've only briefly listened to Canning's album and never to Drew's) it was definitely primarily old BSS standards.
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