A recent article in the Toronto Star by Douglas Bell alerted me to the fact last Monday's New York Times contained an erroneous review of the new Broken Social Scene album. Much of the review seems to focus on Broken Social Scene as a Montreal-based band. Broken Social Scene, of course, is a Toronto-based band. Here's the New York Times review in its entirety.
There's a thick haze - part experimentation, part pretension, part perversity - over the songs on "Broken Social Scene." It's the third album by Broken Social Scene, a Canadian band that doesn't want to make its music too easy.
Broken Social Scene is an alliance loosely led by Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning; its members, now about a dozen, are also active in other Montreal bands. The sound of 21st-century Montreal is coalescing as upbeat anthems overstuffed with instruments and eccentricities. That style was as much a part of Broken Social Scene's beloved 2002 album, "You Forgot It in People" (Arts & Crafts), as of the Arcade Fire's more immediately celebrated 2004 album, "Funeral."
But "Broken Social Scene" refuses to ride on Montreal's momentum. The production is defiantly cluttered, with multiple drum tracks, stray horn sections, instruments run backward and voices and effects arriving out of nowhere. Lead vocals are buried in the mix, and many lyrics are slurred and swallowed.
The album looks back fondly to Pavement, which made its substantial guitar hooks and melodies sound rickety and distracted. One song is titled "Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day)." Broken Social Scene doesn't tamp down its Montreal exuberance; guitar lines leap out of songs like "7/4 (Shoreline)," "Fire Eye'd Boy" and "Superconnected," and so do refrains like "Give 'em all the slip," and "I really don't want to think about those things anymore." The murk clears for the album's finale, "It's All Gonna Break," but that song carries the album's least broadcastable lyrics.
It's easy to sympathize with a band that doesn't want to sell out. But Broken Social Scene confuses integrity with indulgence, burying good songs under way too much studio tomfoolery. JON PARELES
As you see, it's not that Jon Pareles references their home town incorrectly, it's that his analysis is interwoven with "Montreal's momentum" and "its Montreal exuberance".
A retraction was printed last Thursday and reads, "A CD review on Monday about the band Broken Social Scene and the album bearing its name misidentified its home city. It is Toronto, not Montreal." This, as Bells says, makes the entire review bullshit.
