Broken Social Scene: Full on Social, Slightly Broken

Hil and I saw Toronto's other home town heroes - Broken Social Scene tonight.

In our ongoing quest to check out all of TO's venues, we found ourselves at Kool Haus, a massive warehouse converted to concert venue. The place was packed - the first of 2 shows, I wouldn't be surprised if there were at least 2500 folks in attendance - from the very young, to a an army of twenty and thirty somethings, and after that, some older folks too. The place was so crammed, that this was one of the few times Hil and I weren't able to shimmy ourselves up to the very front.

As there was no opening act, shenanigans started early: 9:30pm, and went on for a solid two and a half hours. Me and Hil were a bit taken aback with the performance - which was a contrast from BSS's "cleaner" recordings, You Forgot It in People, and Feel Good Lost. Although there's a revolving line-up in the band, tonight saw the stage swell with upwards of over twenty people! Some serious sonic blasting was going on - not so much sheets of sound, but big thick walls of audio power. There was also some pyschedlic light show stuff going on - pretty gaudy, choreographed lighting that screamed not so much "indie show", but "full on stadium rock".

The band is no doubt talented, and I was very impressed by their addition of a fiddle player, Julie Penner (or was it Fenner) as well as the mighty vocalist from Calgary's Reverie Sound Review (I thought she looked familiar!). However at times, there was so much sound and bass that everyone's vocals would be drowned out.

Interesting points of note were all the other folks that joined BSS on stage, a virtual who's who of Canada's 'indie scene: a vivacious attention grabbing Leslie Fiest (in spray-on-tight-white jeans - yowza), Amy from Stars, and members from the Most Serene Republic, Do Make Say Think, Apostles of Hustle and even hip-hop hero K-OS.

The guys were soaking up being at home, and we were privvy to some serious musical masturbation - with crazy jams going on for way tooo long. Cases in point would be their last song which went on 5 minutes longer than it should have, and as I looked around the crowd, people were shuffling their feet, waiting to go.

They botched their encore as well, where somehow, one of them decided to stay on stage and proceed to wank himself hoarse with some weird guitar chops for a good 4 - 5 minutes. I think BSS was expecting the crowd to be cheering their heads off in anticipation of an encore, and after that didn't happen, they walked back on sheepishly, and played 3 more songs. Whoops.

There were certainly some good moments though - in particular a few of the tracks off of "You Forgot It In People", and some of the in-between song dialogue. Much was made about the importance of voting on the 23rd, and to top it all off (perhaps in reference to the crowd missing their cue for the encore), the lead singer went something like, "Watch out Toronto... for all those viruses and colds out there, make sure you take care of yourselves. This city is in a big funk right now, there's a huge shadow hanging over it, and it's up to you guys to make things change."

Hil's not the biggest fan of glam rock - she gives the show 6 out of 10.

Meese - I'd give it a 7

j

PS - if you saw BSS play in Vancouver or Calgary earlier this year - fire me an email about how you thought the show was. I'm curious if they're a little less self-indulgent playing in other cities :)