BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE - 9.17 @ House of Blues

You go into a performance of a band like Broken Social Scene knowing you’ll hear some great stuff, but realistically having a feeling that there will be some of your favorite songs that just simply cannot be performed, those instrumental pieces with obscure effects and distortions. But the decade-old band has figured some things out in its lifetime – most importantly, how to give a crowd what it wants.

The stage was not big enough for Broken Social Scene. Members ran from stage left to stage right, from percussion to synth to vocals, from a flute to a guitar to banjo. They were all over the place, just so their music could keep it together in the most beautiful fashion.


Everyone was captivated by the third song, “7/4 (Shoreline)”. BSS played out its set list pulsing feel-good jams from You Forgot it in People and their self-titled, a few oldies and a few ballads. Half way through their super-long-but-no-one-really-minds set, Broken Social Scene surprised all of their longtime followers with a performance of “Guilty Cubicles”, written in 1999, which flowed right into Superconnected to re-energize the crowd.

As the lights faded from red to blue, Kevin Drew had the crowd hold its breath with his ballad “Sweetest Kill”, of the band’s newest album Forgiveness Rock Record. It took a few minutes for everyone to shake off the melancholy, with the emotional air in the room so potent that a few people are inevitably forever changed by that song.

After playing for over 2 hours, and after 2 hours of girls in the crowd screaming, “Anthems!” Drew finally announced their next song, Anthems for a 17-year-old Girl. And still, they kept going. A quick trip to the crowd to surf from back to front and say “Hey” to the fans was another plus. This was the first show I’ve been to where the band just simply decided not to leave and come back for the encore, knowing inevitably that they would just come right back out anyways. Instead, BSS played straight through for almost 3 hours, finally closing with a chant of “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” during “Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day)”, closing with the brass left to finish the chant.

BLUE SCHOLARS with MALKEMORE - 9.16 @ The Paradise

A room full of white college kids from Seattle can surprisingly be a refreshing environment for a hiphop performance. Malkemore was the big surprise of the night,
getting the crowd amped way before Blue Scholars even made an appearance. Lyrics about appreciating where you've come from, costume changes, making the crowd get their hands up and cheezy jokes about getting robbed of their CD cases make Malkemore an act to be enjoyed; you can't take your eyes off him.

As you start to sweat and your arms get tired of staying up and swaying from side to side for so long, you start to wonder how you'll survive the main act's performance. But as Blue Scholars jumped up on stage, everyone forgot how exhausted they already were and got their second wind for the Scholars' island beats and heavy-beated tracks over indie songs like Modest Mouse's "Float On."


Another breath of fresh air came after their performance when the guys stuck around to sign autographs and say hey to everyone who came out to the show. This appreciation is vital for up-and-coming hip hop artists (for anyone up-and-coming, really), and it payed off. There was not a single disappointed soul after that show.