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Broken Social Scene - You Forgot It In People

Album Review

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Broken Social Scene - You Forgot It In People Album Cover

Author's Rating

Vocals

8.5

Musicianship

Lyrics

9.5

Production

Creativity

Lasting Value

Reviewer Tilt

9.75

Final Verdict: 93%

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Broken Social Scene - You Forgot It In People

Reviewed by: lalaKR@dr1cx (10/09/09)

Broken Social Scene - You Forgot It In People
Record Label: Arts & Crafts/Paper Bag
Release Date: October 15, 2002

Typical bands have an architecture that they follow to make it big in the industry: a bass player, a guitar player, a vocalist who probably can't hit high notes without a studio, and a drummer. Blah blah blah. The thing about the indie world is not just its influence on outsiders but the way that it breaks down that concept and sometimes even brings it further. Some bands are collectives, groups of people who play music for a living. Broken Social Scene is one of those bands. From Emily Haines to Feist, to members of Stars and Murray Lightburn from The Dears, the Canadian collective has a long list of contributors with tons of experience.

You Forgot It In People, their second studio album is full of everything you'd expect from this band(or whatever you prefer to call them) which has dramatically improved from their debut Feel Good Lost. If you don't know who BSS are or if you only know them because of that Joy Division cover they did for the film adaption of The Time Traveler's Wife then expect dreamy pop, grinding guitars, and enough indie angst to fill a million diaries and black cover journals.

Be aware that this album is full of instrumentals("Capture the Flag, "Pacific Theme", " Late Nineties Bedroom Rock for the Missionaries", and "Pitter Patter Goes My Heart") so although they're beautiful and at times catchy walls of sound, they're mostly filler and can be skipped. Although they're better than all the hip-hop "skits" you can think of.

Even the actual songs are experimental and brave that for a minute you might think they're instrumentals. "KC Accidental" is a landscape of dreamy pop until the 9 lines of lyrics come in:

All your kind they're coming clean
They shut their eyes, their mess, their scenes
All your kind, their spool and lance
Their crash, their kiss, they harmonize
All your kind they're, all your kind their
All your kind they come and clean
Their sleep through keys
They kill their needs
It's good...

Elsewhere, the disturbingly catchy yet intimate "Stars and Sons" sounds like a chillout aftermath to the best rave that never happened while hard-rockers like "Almost Crimes" and "Cause=Time" are in your face with falsetto stained on their collars to tie them together. Whenever the band gets quiet or you hear a piano, you should usually expect an indie-pop jam session that could've came out from any generation of music that had guitars. However, anti-ballads such as the wonderful "Looks Like the Sun", the jazzy acoustics of "I'm Still Your ***", and the epic "Lover's Spit" (guess what it's about) show that the band can be charging and brutally lovelorn. There's even an electronica track called "Shampoo Suicide" that could've been a b-side from the Dntel/Postal Service catalogue.

However, "Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl" was the opus of the album for me. With almost intelligible and high pitched studio vocals, indie-rock pixie Emily Haines delivers a track so touching that it touches on so many emotions that the simple lyrics are as if they're carrying the whole damn world with them:

Used to be one of the rotten ones and I liked you for that
Bleaching your teeth, smiling flash, talking trash, under your breath
Now you're all gone, got your make-up on and you're not coming back
Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me
Can't you come back?

Never before has five lines displayed so many emotion and regret. Is this for a friend? A past lover? A bandmate? What has she become? It's lyrics like this that are beautiful and simplistic that you can't help but love them and analyze them to an excessive (or obsessive) point. The lyrics that BSS sing are so trembling and poetic that even at their melting points they are deep and they spark things in your mind that you never thought. You might think you wish you wrote some of these lines and some may stay in your heart.

Lead singer Kevin Drew and his squadron of indie colleagues are so balanced you'd think they'd been playing together since The Beatles said "let it be" and the punk movement kicked in to overdrive. Besides the lyrics, the musicianship is so ingenious and perfected that it's almost an orchestration. Imagine a "poppier" version of Explosions In the Sky. It's people like this that show that musicianship has no limitations and can be lifted to new heights. This is a classic example of that.

Either way you want to classify it, You Forgot It In People covers almost every musical taste out there. Listen carefully and you'll find that there's something for everyone here to dig into. Bon appétit, and take a complimentary mint on the way out.