Feist’s voice carries the tone of someone who prioritizes patience and kindness without acting too serious. She speaks with a relaxing cadence, the same way she sings on her albums, and there’s an airy quality to her speech, like she could spring from her seat at any moment and begin to twirl playfully around the room. Ultimately, "Sentimental X's" is a love song there's lots of forgiveness, but nobody feels sorry.Leslie Feist has a special type of charm. The connections are transitory but also indestructible. "Off and on is what we want," sings Haines, narrating the band's gift-and-curse plight, "A friend of a friend you used to call/ Or a friend of a friend you used/ You used to call." Which is what Broken Social Scene is: a mess of friends using friends, loving friends, calling friends, wanting to call friends, and then not calling friends anymore. It checks off another BSS box- the subtly devastating Emily Haines-sung heart-tugger.
Which leads us to the indiscretion summary "Sentimental X's". All of those tracks excellently fill their respective niches, but the fact that there are niches at all adds a bittersweet tinge to a band that once sounded like everything else and nothing else. There are now marks that listeners expect them to hit, and they're nailed with focus and precision: the peppy, horn-laden track from Apostle of Hustle's Andrew Whiteman ("Art House Director"), the back-of-the-bus acoustic session ("Highway Slipper Jam"), the immense instrumental to end all immense instrumentals ("Meet Me in the Basement"). For the most part, Drew and company are referencing the same beloved bands on Forgiveness, with one key addition: Broken Social Scene themselves. (Feist does show up on Forgiveness, but only for background vocals.)Īs an alt-hippie with obsessions for Dinosaur Jr., Jeff Buckley, and Ennio Morricone, BSS main face Kevin Drew led the burgeoning band to somewhere completely fresh with You Forgot It In People, an album that read like a non-ironic, indie-rock Odelay for the early 2000s. And the vocals on the beautiful, synth-laden "All to All" are serviceably performed by relative newcomer Lisa Lobsinger, where Leslie Feist's stronger, more possessed delivery may have pushed it into another weight class entirely. "Texico Bitches", despite its misleading breezy accompaniment, is an increasingly topical indictment of big oil that repeats the word "bitches" 12 times. The band's newfound tightness results in a few of the most chart-friendly songs in BSS history, although as usual, each seems to come with a built-in caveat to prevent the potential of radio play: the sweat-soaked "World Sick", with its massive crescendos building to one visceral, heart-pounding release after another, is nearly seven minutes long with extended instrumental intros and outros. Unlike their last album's sometimes indulgent cut-and-paste sonic collages, Forgiveness has distinct targets and leaves little room for wayward meanders. Considering the co-producer's experimental bona fides, it's surprising that this is the most song-based album the band has ever made- every track but one contains vocals, and a couple seem to be filled with more words than the entirety of You Forgot It In People.
Working with band hero, Tortoise/Sea and Cake drummer, and post-rock mastermind John McEntire for the first time, Broken Social Scene made sure to have their shit together. Their ambition is intact.įorgiveness Rock Record's thematic bent is mature, and that sense of gravity is embedded into the music, too. There's a song that sounds like Pavement, one that sounds like the Sea and Cake (featuring Sea and Cake singer Sam Prekop), another like a Broadway adaptation of Children of Men, a weightless ballad that may double as an ode to masturbation, and a song that's basically five minutes of atmospheric pop perfection. The album lets bygones go while acknowledging the pain and discipline involved, and does so while keeping with the band's indie-mixtape rep. Because forgiveness is hard, especially for a group this grand and this intertwined for this long. (Well, maybe not him.) And while a 59-minute absolution session sounds excessive for even the most devout fans, Broken Social Scene aren't just throwing out hail marys here. Who, exactly? Each other, loves, bad decisions, humanity at large, worse decisions, the past, the future, culture, corporations, art, you, me, maybe even George W.
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