Great show. I had a few reservations going in about seeing Broken Social Scene for the third time in about two months. Mainly that the show at the Metro in August was so powerful and amazing, I wasn’t sure how this could match up. Don’t get me wrong, the show at the Vic the other night was so much fun (Of course, being in the front row at the Vic helped make this an even greater experience on Thursday night…), but there at the Metro in August, there was this crazy energy in the air probably just because it was really late at night.
But the Social Scene delivered once again. When they came out on stage, in my head I dubbed it “Broken Social Scene: fall model” because they were all wearing button down flannel shirts and jackets, as opposed to the fedoras and tank tops that Lollapalooza and its accompanying heat brought. It was a nice, slow build with the initial instrumental jam into Shampoo Suicide, but when that first crescendo hit, I remembered why I love this band so much. It is an emotional explosion. Their songs take all these positive and negative emotions and blast them out from wherever they are hiding. We celebrate the good and the bad. We scream for whatever is inside us. That part of “Ibi Dreams of Pavement” where Kevin Drew counts to three and everyone screams as loud as we can gets me every time. We, as a collective, let everything out of us at that moment. These are no longer are individual hopes and fears, they are everyone’s hopes and fears.
“All right, it’s therapy time everybody. This little bit we do for everybody, every human being in the house tonight. For everything you’ve lost, for everything you didn’t get, for everything you hurt, for everyone that hurt you, everything you want to become, everything you never became, you’re gonna scream. All right? You’re gonna let it all out, you’re gonna be as loud as you can…On the count of three, you gotta scream your guts out. You ready? Therapy. One. Two. Three. Scream. Go.” – transcribed the best I could from this youtube video (not mine, but whoever shot it did a good job, but go to the actual youtube page with it so you can see the high quality verison)
The setlist was made up of a nice mix of BSS songs and songs from both “Broken Social Scene Presents…” albums. The Kevin Drew album was my favorite release of 2007 and the Brendan Canning album is growing on me more each time I hear it, so I would have welcomed more of those songs, but the ones they played were awesome. I was really happy to hear “Safety Bricks,” which Kevin Drew prefaced by saying it was a song about “having kids and making it work,” and then afterwards said, “That’s like my diary. ‘Dear Diary, I fucked up again.'”
The only weird moment came when they stopped playing “Superconencted” after two attempts because of too much feedback on the monitors on stage. I get really nervous whenever something appears to go wrong on stage, because I fear for the worst. But when Kevin Drew and Justin Peroff came back onstage after Charles Spearin’s “Happiness Project,” it looked (and sounded) like things had been taken care off. And then finishing the show with two amazing songs erased any nervousness for the band that I had.
Land of Talk was a really good opening act as well. I’m a relatively new fan of theirs and their set made me want to go listen to their new album, Some Are Lakes again real soon. And then Liz Powell did the lady part during the BSS set. I don’t want to compare it to the other ladies, as I was kind of spoiled seeing Broken Social Scene for the first time at Lollapalooza 2006 with everyone, but she did an amazing job. She fit right in and made her voice work for whatever it needed to do. I was really happy that the rest of the crowd thought that too and gave Liz a huge ovation after “Anthems.” And she was ridiculously cute when she would dance around on stage waiting for her part to come it. I know she is on Something For All Of Us, and hopefully they keep her part of the collective for the next “real” Social Scene release, whenever that might be.
This is what I could piece together of the setlist afterwards. No guarantees that it is correct, but I think I remembered everything they played.
1. Fuzz (Late Nineties Bedroom Rock for the Missionaries / Shampoo Suicide)
2. Cause = Time
3. Hit The Wall
4. Churches Under The Stairs
5. 7/4 (Shoreline)
6. Fire Eye’d Boy
7. Love Is New
8. Farewell To The Pressure Kids
9. Safety Bricks
10. Three Thousand Miles (Hawaii song, Sam Goldberg on vocals)
11. Fucked Up Kid
12. Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl
13. KC Accidental
14. Superconnected (aborted)
——————(I guess this is the closest thing to an encore break)
15. Charles Spearin’s “Happiness Project”
16. Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day)
17. It’s All Gonna Break
Broken Social Scene was:
Brendan Canning
Kevin Drew
Justin Peroff
Charles Spearin
Sam Goldberg
Leon Kingstone
Andrew Whiteman
Elizabeth Powell
Awkward Commas
An Emotional Explosion – Broken Social Scene and Land of Talk at the Vic Theatre 10.09.08
October 12, 2008
Great show. I had a few reservations going in about seeing Broken Social Scene for the third time in about two months. Mainly that the show at the Metro in August was so powerful and amazing, I wasn’t sure how this could match up. Don’t get me wrong, the show at the Vic the other night was so much fun (Of course, being in the front row at the Vic helped make this an even greater experience on Thursday night…), but there at the Metro in August, there was this crazy energy in the air probably just because it was really late at night.
But the Social Scene delivered once again. When they came out on stage, in my head I dubbed it “Broken Social Scene: fall model” because they were all wearing button down flannel shirts and jackets, as opposed to the fedoras and tank tops that Lollapalooza and its accompanying heat brought. It was a nice, slow build with the initial instrumental jam into Shampoo Suicide, but when that first crescendo hit, I remembered why I love this band so much. It is an emotional explosion. Their songs take all these positive and negative emotions and blast them out from wherever they are hiding. We celebrate the good and the bad. We scream for whatever is inside us. That part of “Ibi Dreams of Pavement” where Kevin Drew counts to three and everyone screams as loud as we can gets me every time. We, as a collective, let everything out of us at that moment. These are no longer are individual hopes and fears, they are everyone’s hopes and fears.
“All right, it’s therapy time everybody. This little bit we do for everybody, every human being in the house tonight. For everything you’ve lost, for everything you didn’t get, for everything you hurt, for everyone that hurt you, everything you want to become, everything you never became, you’re gonna scream. All right? You’re gonna let it all out, you’re gonna be as loud as you can…On the count of three, you gotta scream your guts out. You ready? Therapy. One. Two. Three. Scream. Go.” – transcribed the best I could from this youtube video (not mine, but whoever shot it did a good job, but go to the actual youtube page with it so you can see the high quality verison)
The setlist was made up of a nice mix of BSS songs and songs from both “Broken Social Scene Presents…” albums. The Kevin Drew album was my favorite release of 2007 and the Brendan Canning album is growing on me more each time I hear it, so I would have welcomed more of those songs, but the ones they played were awesome. I was really happy to hear “Safety Bricks,” which Kevin Drew prefaced by saying it was a song about “having kids and making it work,” and then afterwards said, “That’s like my diary. ‘Dear Diary, I fucked up again.'”
The only weird moment came when they stopped playing “Superconencted” after two attempts because of too much feedback on the monitors on stage. I get really nervous whenever something appears to go wrong on stage, because I fear for the worst. But when Kevin Drew and Justin Peroff came back onstage after Charles Spearin’s “Happiness Project,” it looked (and sounded) like things had been taken care off. And then finishing the show with two amazing songs erased any nervousness for the band that I had.
Land of Talk was a really good opening act as well. I’m a relatively new fan of theirs and their set made me want to go listen to their new album, Some Are Lakes again real soon. And then Liz Powell did the lady part during the BSS set. I don’t want to compare it to the other ladies, as I was kind of spoiled seeing Broken Social Scene for the first time at Lollapalooza 2006 with everyone, but she did an amazing job. She fit right in and made her voice work for whatever it needed to do. I was really happy that the rest of the crowd thought that too and gave Liz a huge ovation after “Anthems.” And she was ridiculously cute when she would dance around on stage waiting for her part to come it. I know she is on Something For All Of Us, and hopefully they keep her part of the collective for the next “real” Social Scene release, whenever that might be.
This is what I could piece together of the setlist afterwards. No guarantees that it is correct, but I think I remembered everything they played.
1. Fuzz (Late Nineties Bedroom Rock for the Missionaries / Shampoo Suicide)
2. Cause = Time
3. Hit The Wall
4. Churches Under The Stairs
5. 7/4 (Shoreline)
6. Fire Eye’d Boy
7. Love Is New
8. Farewell To The Pressure Kids
9. Safety Bricks
10. Three Thousand Miles (Hawaii song, Sam Goldberg on vocals)
11. Fucked Up Kid
12. Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl
13. KC Accidental
14. Superconnected (aborted)
——————(I guess this is the closest thing to an encore break)
15. Charles Spearin’s “Happiness Project”
16. Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day)
17. It’s All Gonna Break
Broken Social Scene was:
Brendan Canning
Kevin Drew
Justin Peroff
Charles Spearin
Sam Goldberg
Leon Kingstone
Andrew Whiteman
Elizabeth Powell
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Tags: brendan canning, broken social scene, concert, it's all gonna break, kevin drew, land of talk, live music, liz powell, october 2008, saftey bricks, screaming, vic theatre