Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record

29 April 2010 by Max Easton

Having taken a five year recording silence in favour of band-supported solo works, Toronto indie staple Broken Social Scene have released their fourth album by the name of ‘Forgiveness Rock Record.’

Broken Social Scene have been the vanguard of the Toronto music scene over the past decade, drawing together twenty-five artists throughout their history under one moniker for some of Canada’s most celebrated recent independent releases. With the band’s core members comprised of founders Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning, the rest of the outfit is somewhat of a revolving door that spins according to the commitments of the various artists’ side projects. Acts like Feist, Apostle of Hustle, Metric and Stars all share their players’ with the band, which makes each and every album coming out of its centre a very collaborative affair. This physical movement results in unusual aural consequence, achieving a diverse and densely layered sound resembling a cacophony of reigned-in chaos. For their fourth outing, Forgiveness Rock Record, the band are right back into the swing of things with a venture into a sound that they’ve very much called their own, whilst tacking on an evolution into untouched territory for good measure. 

The album takes its time to wake up from the band’s five year slumber, with ten seconds of silence leading into the layer by layer introduction of World Sick’s climactic wall of sound moments, ebbing and flowing back to carefully minimalist gaps between the noise. It’s a thrilling opening to a great album, leading into Chase Scene, a brash new venture into late 80’s synths. Whilst it’s a sound that has become incredibly overdone of late, it’s carried as a tip of the hat to the sound rather than a gimmicky plagiarism that the trend has seen elsewhere. Indeed, it’s this attitude of use rather than abuse that paints the rest of the record. Broken Social Scene have never stepped away from a certain style or sound that might not fit the glove, but have instead embraced the diversity that comes with a range of influences. One of the most prevalent this time around is most definitely that aforementioned electronically driven twinge, but that’s not really a bad thing, and it’s not totally new to the band either. The manage it by working sublime playing underneath the synthesized experiments in sound…maybe it’s okay to a cynic’s ears to have a synth driven track if it’s backed up by a brass section, who knows…but it tends to work more often than it doesn’t.

The two singles off the record, Texico Bitches and Forced to Love, are perhaps two of the most forgettable; they’re both punchy, well played tracks, but are a couple that just seem to be poor choices to advertise the album with. They’re also probably the ones that are most commercially viable, so I suppose the choice can be justified. Thankfully, the phenomenal follow up to these two of All In All (featuring Emily Haines of Metric, Amy Milan from Stars and Leslie Feist in whatever the three-person equivalent of a duet is) and Art House Director return the album to its finest run of tracks. With Andrew Whiteman’s sonic landscapes from Apostle of Hustle taking over the latter, they’re brilliant examples of the diversity that this album brings to the table. With such a broad range of styles sitting within the one album, it could almost be a compilation, and that’s an idea that I don’t think has ever been truly explored in Broken Social Scene’s past.

The ethereal dreamscape of Highway Slipper Jam carries on that run of tracks into the brilliant back end of the album. With highlights ranging from Emily Haines return on Sentimental X’s to Brendan Canning’s Dinosaur Jr-esque drunken, upbeat sing-a-long, Water in Hell (featuring him at his occasionally off-key best), the latter end of the album makes this by far one of Broken Social Scene and co’s finest works to date. 

What can you expect of this album? I feel like after 700 words that I haven’t even begun to answer that question, and with not much more to go, I don’t think I’ll be able to. Forgiveness Rock Record somehow attains the feat of existing as Broken Social Scene’s most accessible and most experimental album simultaneously. At times, there’s nothing else like this in the world. At other times, it feels like a couple of the tracks could easily be released on a Metric or Apostle of Hustle record without budging an eyebrow. It’s almost a sonic contradiction, and sometimes a bit of dichotomy is good for you.

With Forgiveness Rock Record, Broken Social Scene has delivered what is probably their greatest achievement. It’s such an incredibly varied and unique record…and that’s not just a nice way to say that it blows. They’ve done what they do every time they release an album. They drag a stack of minds into the studio and they create something that none of those singular minds could do…and each time they do it, each mind has evolved into something entirely fresh and new, which has this time materialized into Forgiveness Rock Record, which is, for all intents and purposes, a flipping good record indeed. 

Forgiveness Rock Record is out May 7th on Spunk.

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