There’s a core irony to Broken Social Scene that defines their canonized classics: their maximalist indie-rock is pointillistic—communal uplift in collage, with guitars and voices and horns blurring together as they dart around your speakers. But Kevin Drew, the Canadian collective’s de facto bandleader, can also spark emotion with the sparsest of tools, almost out of thin air. Take “Lover’s Spit,” a song so primal it might scan as conventional by their standards. There’s a distant fog of piano, some tape hiss, some brass and percussion that gradually swell via David Newfeld’s hand-stitched mix. But it’s a scrappy cathedral built on the foundation of Drew’s plainspoken, almost jarring observations: “All these people drinking lover’s spit / Sit around, clean their face with it.” The best Broken Social Scene songs feel simultaneously enormous and intimate, like a symphony orchestra in your bedroom.
The same logic applies to “Parking Lot Dreams,” the twinkly closing centerpiece from the band’s sixth LP, Remember the Humans. Here, a high-octave bass pokes its head through the haze of strummed acoustic guitars and atmospheric strings, as Drew unfurls sad-sounding lines about a “death vacation” and a body “in heat.” I don’t need to know if this song is about regret or longing or nostalgia. It feels absolutely enormous, even when hardly anything is happening.
This, their first album in almost nine years, is a homecoming of sorts—reuniting them with Newfeld, who produced what most fans still consider their true standards: 2002’s You Forgot It in People and 2005’s Broken Social Scene. It’s not like the band needed their old friend to recapture some long-lost zest. The albums they’ve made in the interim, 2010’s Forgiveness Rock Record and 2017’s Hug of Thunder, showed logical growth—emphasizing the strength of their heart-tugging melodies (“Skyline,” “Forced to Love,” “World Sick,” “Protest Song”) and scaling back some of the production eccentricities. But goddamn, hearing them back together again is magical. Rarely have a producer and band been more suited for each other, with Newfeld’s knack for microscopic sonic drama—hard panning, stacked percussion, colorful EQ, instruments dropping in and out—amplifying the wide-eyed, open-armed wonder baked into their music.
Newfeld has never seemed intimidated by the idea of capturing the full flight of such an enormous band—one that often stretches out to 10 in one setting. Opener “Not Around Anymore” is a full-on bear hug, a sensation amplified by that Newfeld-y touch: the drums floating through the stereo spectrum, the voices pogoing giddily amid curlicue guitars. The mid-tempo pseudo-ballad “Only the Good I Keep,” the Broken Social Scene debut of Vancouver indie-pop artist Hannah Georgas, is a warm bath of a tune with subtly bizarre presentation: the oceanic piano chords, the hushed trombones, the way Newfeld strips the song back to its rhythm section before building it back up again.
Like You Forgot It In People, much of Remember the Humans is perfectly suited for late-night headphone treatment—a natural platform, one might say, to feel good lost. “Briefest Kiss” could be the sexiest Broken Social Scene song ever, their Sade moment—highlighted by stabbing synths, textured drumming, a delightfully warped bass groove, and the welcome return of vocalist Ariel Engle, who previously elevated the eternal “Halfway Home.” (It also features some of Newfeld’s most intriguing bits of production work: toward the end, the track dissolves to reveal what sounds like a shadow recording, a voice memo of a voice memo, only to blast back into full bloom.) Meanwhile, it’s worth celebrating any time Feist sings with this band: “What Happens Now,” like “Parking Lot Dreams,” is a lovely pre-dawn sigh, her unanswered questions bathed in fuzz and chased by muted drums.
This sleepier mode might require patience here and there, but Broken Social Scene balance out the mood board with a handful of their churning, punchy rockers: “Relief,” fronted by Lisa Lobsinger, belongs on their Mount Rushmore alongside “Boyfriends” and “7/4 (Shoreline),” with a two-chord pulse and a descending chorus hook that smacks like the most satisfying release of pent-up angst. “What a relief,” Lobsinger admits, “To finally feel / To finally be.” You could search for deeper meaning—or you could, like with other Social Scene classics, just let it all wash over you. [Arts & Crafts]
Ryan Reed is a writer and editor from Knoxville, Tennessee. In addition to Paste, his work has appeared over the years in Rolling Stone, Revolver, The New York Times, Pitchfork, and many other publications.
