Canadian supergroup returns, remains less than super…
[Video]
[4.86]
Micha Cavaseno: Indie music entitlement finally gets its “We Built This City.”
[4]
William John: The best Broken Social Scene songs walk a tightrope between rousing bombast and the spare aesthetic that’s often appropriate when conveying crushing sadness. “Halfway Home,” from the band’s first new album in seven years, is certainly loud, what with its enveloping, amorphous guitar clouds and relentless drums. But the polyvocalism, once the band’s trademark, works against them. There are too many voices, too many ideas, too many things happening that never coagulate in the way that the work of Drew, Canning & the remainder of Canada has historically managed to. The band is back together, but they haven’t figured out how to communicate what they need to say.
[5]
Thomas Inskeep: Indie that actually rocks, propulsively. For what it is, it’s pretty solid.
[6]
Hannah Jocelyn: The beginning is everything I want from indie rock, with the thundering drums and gorgeous waves of tense guitars, but this thing just keeps going and going for five minutes, gradually losing any sense of form. There’s little dynamic shift in the whole song, even though grand crescendos are the reason to even make a five-minute indie rock song in the first place. There’s only so much I can take of a gaggle of Canadians maniacally throwing their instruments at a brick wall before I get a headache.
[6]
Alfred Soto: When the singer mumbles while the zealously mixed guitars aggregate into an imitation of a wall of sound, I admit it sounds pretty. But Built For Spill sounded pretty too. Then the singer mimics Bono.
[4]
David Sheffieck: The breakneck pace reminds me of the second best BSS song — “Major Label Debut (Fast)” — but this replaces the massive hook of the original with a whole lot of clutter: in the backing vocals, in the chaos of the guitar parts, and especially in the messiness of the mix. I want to like it, and the energy is infectious — but only to a point, dissipating as quickly as the feedback fades.
[5]
Tim de Reuse: BSS’s last few records sounded messy, but they were jumbled and cluttered in a way that had a bite. Every individual element was bright and sharp in its own corner of the mix. This is reminiscent of their past output, but it sounds like a soft drink gone flat (seriously, do a little A/B testing against some cuts off Forgiveness Rock Record), in part because most of the song consists of back-to-back dramatic gestures compressed into structural fuzz. They wanted to make a triumphant return, so they released a comeback song that spends most of its time trying to seem like a grand finale.
[4]