Broken Social Scene, "You Forgot It In People"
Come on feel the noise



One of the most accurate things I can state with any certainty regarding Broken Social Scene's "You Forgot It In People" is that the album's title is inscrutable as the music contained inside.

And, to quote everyone's favorite jailed domestic diva, that's a good thing.

A Canadian "music collective" formed in 1999 by Kevin Drew (of K.C. Accidental) and Brendan Canning (of By Divine Right), I had never heard of BSS before picking up this disc. The band's (um, sorry, "music collective's") modus operandi is all over the map. It's as if some highly eclectic bar band of egghead college students performed "rock music history" set to shuffle mode.

The cover, with its dark, muddy black & white photo of the band in the middle of what appears to be a sweaty club gig, is misleading. I was expecting a thrashy blend of indie punk, and while there certainly is some of that here, when I first hit "play," the results were refreshingly more diverse. The opening track, "Capture the Flag," kicks everything off with ambient keyboards before a rising, intrusive trumpet barges in, signaling the beginning of the album proper.

This is the first major gear shift. The second track, "KC Accidental," is - make no mistake - heavily influenced by prog rock (by way of some D.I.Y. punk). The swooping melody and galloping rhythms suggest Yes as a bar band (as fronted by the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne). Gears shift once again on track three, the heavily New Order-influenced "Stars and Sons." It should be noted (before I carelessly forget) that Sonic Youth's sound is all over this album as well. And so on. I doubt Blogger's bandwidth can handle the list of influnces these guys absorb.

There's lots of noise on "You Forgot It In People," giving the album an unpolished feel, but never compromising the band's commitment to aching hooks. Like Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," there's plenty of distorted effects, random feedback, and "found objects" that give the listener plenty to chew on, keeping it infinitely listenable. It's one of those albums (again, like "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot") that you could listen to a hundred times and still discover something new.

There's a refreshing down-to-earth quality throughout. "Looks Like the Sun" lumbers along in sunny, acoustic beauty, while the singer (being a true "collective," the liner notes don't credit who exactly plays what) can be heard calling out chord changes between lines, in addition to various other instructions ("keep it going"). Let's try Britney do that (once she learns what a "chord" is).

The band employs sing-songy, idiosyncratic, nursery rhyme-like lyrics ("Anthems For a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl"), wah-wah guitar reminiscent of Ween's "A Tear For Eddie" ("Shampoo Suicide") and even tropical-influenced instrumentals ("Pacific Theme"). And that's just for starters.

There doesn't seem to be a game plan to "You Forgot It In People," just a need to create, experiment, and keep the music flowing. Even within the alleged originality and vitality of indie rock, Broken Social Scene finds new ways to keep it fresh.