Retrospective Thursday: BSS at NYU

September 4th, 2008

A caveat: I am not a Broken Social Scene fan. That isn’t to say I don’t like them, quite the contrary, I just can’t call myself a fan. I couldn’t name you more than a few songs, and I could sing you even fewer. I’m actually more familiar with Kevin Drew’s excellent solo album Spirit If…. That being said, I know who they are and many of my friends are BSS fans. So when I found out that they would be the headliners of my school’s annual mystery concert, I was curious but undecided. An opening set by the French Kicks and the fact that it was free was enough to convince me.

It was, in a word, AWESOME. My beloved French Kicks were preceded by Pattern is Movemen, a dynamic two-piece with energetic beat and wailing vocals, but whose beards and banter upstaged their songs. It was seeing them live that originally made me a fan, so I was thrilled to be seeing the Kicks again. Their set was Swimming heavy, but it pulled from their old releases well. I was disappointed not to hear “So Far We Are” but found a new favorite song in “Carried Away.” Definitely the best use of a maraca I’ve seen all year.

Since I don't listen to a lot of BSS, I was irrationally expecting a mellow set, but was really pleasantly surprised when they rocked. Plus, Kevin Drew is really hot, in a bearded, flannel-wearing, Canadian Eddie Vedder look-alike kind of way. Coming in, I was most curious to see exactly how many of them there would be (as their rotating membership is famous). I told my friend before they came on “If there are less than 10 of them, I’m walking.” I was only partly kidding. At the least there were 6 (after Kevin Drew's mic broke, then his amp broke and he left the stage) and at the most there were 12 (including 5 horn players and Land of Talk’s Lizzie Powell as the only female presence). Actually, I guess there were 13 at the most, if you count when Kevin Drew pulled up a kid from the audience and had the band play a song along with him.

The set was upbeat and dynamic, including songs from the solo albums of Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning (“Fucked Up Kid” and “Hit the Wall”) as well as a Land of Talk cover, for obvious reasons. I couldn’t name you the songs, but no one in the audience looked disappointed. Then again, the freshmen who mainly made up the audience probably wouldn’t have been disappointed by anything. For the closing number Kevin Drew invited everyone to come up on stage and dance. Whether or not he expected it, he got what he wanted. Probably 80 percent of the audience ended up onstage. Julia and I were too far back to join, but the stage was so crowded, it was ridiculous! He kept telling people to stop coming up but they just kept coming. They managed to keep playing despite kids crowding the mics and jumping up on amps, I have no idea how they did it. It was pretty crazy and I'm so glad I went even though it was mostly stupid freshmen.