They dabbled with this a bit previously on tracks like Forgiveness Rock Record’s “Texico Bitches,” but there’s a fairly triumphant quality to the majority of Hug of Thunder. Hug of Thunder isn’t just cohesive, it’s also the closest Broken Social Scene have come to making upbeat, pop-oriented rock songs. Between opening guitar notes that echo Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and a closing horn section that echoes the band’s own “7/4 (Shoreline)”, Kevin Drew lets out shout-along lines like “you said we’re halfway home, you said survive” and “if you never run, never run, how they gonna catch you alive?”
#Protest song broken social scene full#
For instance, after the album’s mellow, instrumental opener “Sol Luna,” it explodes into “Halfway Home,” full of energetic riffs and catchy hooks. It plays to the band’s strengths of making anthemic rock songs, potentially an obvious consequence of having fifteen members participating on the album, but tones down the band’s experimental tendencies in favor of a more straightforward approach. Soon, the dynamic switched from “I should check out Feist’s solo albums since I like Broken Social Scene” to “I love Feist, so maybe I should check out that band she was in.”Īfter seven years of absence, Hug of Thunder reinvigorates Broken Social Scene as an indie rock force, and is their most cohesive album to date. Its disparate members instead focused on their main projects, and each of the aforementioned related bands were more active than Broken Social Scene. While Broken Social Scene released the well-received Forgiveness Rock Record in 2010, it failed to reignite the hype that propelled the band to indie rock stardom only a few years prior. However, this brand has faltered a bit during the last ten years. And if you needed any further evidence of the power of the Broken Social Scene brand, members Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning each released a solo album under the heading “Broken Social Scene presents…” Have you ever heard of the bands Metric, Stars, Apostle of Hustle, Do Make Say Think, or of the singer Leslie Feist? They all have key members in Broken Social Scene, which functions as the common thread allowing these bands to boost one another’s popularity.
You could therefore call the band a “supergroup,” but as with fellow Canadian rockers The New Pornographers, applying that term here seems somewhat incomplete. And perhaps most importantly, they became a brand.īroken Social Scene wasn’t just a band that released influential albums, it was a unifying force for over a dozen different Canadian musicians who each had their own projects. They had a devoted enough following to sell out three nights in a row at the same venue. They had two critically acclaimed albums under their belt: 2002’s You Forgot It In People and 2005’s Broken Social Scene.
Broken Social Scene were the band to be a decade ago.
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