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.