Track Listing

1. Our faces split the coast in half [vocals by Feist, featuring Murray Lightburn on guitar]
2. Ibi dreams of pavement (a better day)
3. 7/4 (shoreline) [vocals by Feist]
4. Finish your collapse and stay for breakfast
5. Major label debut
6. Fire eye�d boy
7. Windsurfing nation [vocals by Feist and k-os]
8. Swimmers [vocals by Emily Haines]
9. Hotel
10. Handjobs for the holidays
11. Superconnected
12. Bandwitch
13. Tremoloa debut
14. It�s all gonna break [vocals by Feist]

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #59550 in Music
• Released on: 2006-01-23
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
Broken Social Scene are a Canadian collective made up of members of established Toronto bands such as A Silver Mt Zion, Stars and Do Make Say Think. The crew caused a splash in 2002 with their formidable You Forgot It In People, which went on to win a Canadian JUNO. The subsequent pressure for a follow-up has been immense but they’ve managed to come up trumps with this eponymous offering.

Producer Dave Newfeld nurtures the same meticulously shambolic production style that made YFIIP such a messy joy, encouraging the band to embrace an even more sprawling and inventive aesthetic. Tracks "bleed" into one another like Rothko colours, but the sheer amount of people involved--ten key members plus several guests including Feist and rapper K-Os--lend the project a quite astonishing diversity. Despite a dense squall of sound often obscuring lyrics and sonic detail, the collective’s sub-pop chops consistently ring out in a triumphant flurry of catchy hooks, hypnotic riffs and compelling melodies. As big as the sky and as fluid as a dream, Broken Social Scene is that rare thing: an experimental album that actually rocks. --Paul Sullivan

CD Description
Third studio album from Toronto outfit Broken Social Scene and follow-up to 2002's 'You Forgot It In People'. Their heavily orchestrated, guitar-driven sound has been likened by critics to an experimental take on the music of fellow Canadians Arcade Fire. As with the previous album, it was producedby David Newfeld at his Stars and Sons studio.

Customer Reviews

Good but noisy!
Great songs but my only criticism is that it's sometimes difficult to pick out the great tunes through the noise. There's a lot going on on this album almost constantly. Sometimes that's great but sometimes it just gets too much and everything gets lost in the cacophony. Still gets 4 stars though.

The Gateway to all of Canada.
Canada is better than us. If the world is a school playground then Canada has just stolen the UK's girlfriend by being better and cooler, and who cares? The UK wasn't treating her right!

As if to flex the national musical muscle, nearly all of the best artists in the country gang together to form Broken Social Scene and create an album of utter brilliance. They're kind of like the Justice League of Canada except without Spandex. I could pick out individual songs but it'd just read like the tracklisting with me gushing between each one, so I won't bother.

And just to make us look worse, if you follow the threads of the collaborators you'll only find more and more astonishing albums; 'Let it Die' by Feist, 'Folkloric Feel' Apostle of Hustle, Both Stars albums, By Divine Right - Also have a look at 'Reverie Sound Revue' since Lisa Lobsinger is now a full time member of BSS.

If I was going to pick out one problem with the album it's the fact that I will never be able to join the band firstly because I'm not from Canada and secondly because I have no talent. But I can dream can't I?

Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene
Imagine a patchwork quilt. Expansive, eclectic; bearing the touch of numerous caring benefactors. It has scores of different colours, textures and techniques; brought together to create warmth, as well as imbuing a usually impersonal object with a form of direct human contact. You zoom in, the quilt moves closer, the boundaries start to shift and blend. Now it resembles a landscape, an irregular patchwork of fields, lanes and pastures marked out by rambling, unkempt hedgerows and softly crumbling stone walls. A morning light bathes the scene, illuminating the land, at once both hazily soft, and crisp, like the frosted earth beneath.

Like an early morning, 'Broken Social Scene' is not only sleep-eyed, freshly awoken, but almost tangibly charged with potential and excitement. The opener, 'Our Faces Split The Coast In Half', unfurls and moves organically like the meandering of a small stream, flowing smoothly over softly spoken vocals and clashing against percussive outcrops. Broken Social Scene have a chaotic beauty that can only be compared to nature: dawning birdsong, a breeze, sunlight on water.

At around 17 members, the band certainly creates a varied patchwork, and, like the quilt, they are all combined in a pleasingly lo-tech way, sometimes stitched with thick, funky grooves and hand-clapping party euphoria, at others, only by fragile strands of lo-fi electronica hanging deftly like cobwebs. Comparisons to Arcade Fire are inevitable, but not necessarily relevant. Yes, they are a multi-instrumental band hailing from Toronto, and yes, they have supported Arcade Fire on tour, but this album is quite a different proposition to Funeral; it seems at once more epic and broad in its scope, as well as more intimately modest in approach. Where Arcade Fire focused obssessively on a neighbourhood, Broken Social Scene take a wide angle view or the world that surrounds them, whilst retaining the detail of the personal.

The music is a rich tapestry of beautiful and diaphonous, yet assuredly solid layers; instrumentation built up on itself to such an overwhelming point that the vocals often seem drowned in sound, reminiscent of guitar-drone bands such as My Bloody Valentine. The melodic pop sensibility of The Arcade Fire is often replaced by one more akin to that of post-rock: complex, abstracted, ascendant and uplifting compositions, starting with a simple, throbbing backbeat to crescendo eventually with dramatic collisions of horns, multi-tracked vocal harmonies and scatterings of crisp percussion. Like the patchwork quilt or the pastoral landscape, the more you look, the more you'll see; the more incidental patterns or hidden vistas will emerge. This is an organic, hand-me-down record that combines incredible variety with overall cohesion. It is one that deserves attention, one that you need to discover and slowly explore, one that will wash over you, lift you up and scatter you blissfully down.

Essential escapism.