Where Broken Social Scene once evoked the passionate unease of teenage years, they now capture the passionate unease of adulthood. Here, on Hug of Thunder, they sound rejuvenated with their music taking on a more emotional significance than it has in over a decade. The band’s last album, 2010’s Forgiveness Rock Record, presented the group with an air professionalism that felt dispassionate. Rather, Hug of Thunder is imbued with a sense of forthrightness and direction that other Broken Social Scene records lacked, but its message isn’t weighed down by austerity. There’s also nothing lyrically here that’s as meaningfully meaningless as “Lover’s Spit” or “It’s All Gonna Break”. Hug of Thunder goes a long way in erasing the looseness of previous efforts - there is nothing on here remotely like the fourth-wall breaking spoken word direction that interrupts the singing on You Forgot‘s on “Looks Just Like the Sun”. They even touched the more cynical listeners who weren’t into the whole big-hearted emotion thing.īut the Broken Social Scene Hug of Thunder is very different from the Broken Social Scene on those first two records. This, coupled with the band’s powerful dynamics, made them hit square in the pleasure centers for people finding music on their own for the first time. Instead, the lyrics are casually obsessive, just like a young person’s mind when they start falling in love for the first time. These oblique, first-person narratives trimmed the distance between memory and emotion because they didn’t aim for profundity. Rather than rely on cultural signifiers to evoke their teenage dreaming, songs like the Feist-led gems “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl” and “Swimmers” felt like the genuine article. While there were other bands that also did the swooning-indie-pop-made-by-a-bunch-of-people thing, like Architecture in Helsinki or I’m From Barcelona, or others chased after memories of youth, like M83 on the aptly titled Saturdays + Youth, Broken Social Scene was able to make the experience real through expression. It’s fitting for Broken Social Scene, who was able to swing from singer-songwriter-ish ballads to post-rock influenced explosions, to not be defined by emotion, but, rather, an underlying spirit of an era in a person’s life. The paradoxical power of their music conjures the swollen heart intensity of youth. By that same token, “nostalgic” doesn’t quite feel right either. Paradoxically, this emotional precision makes it impossible to reduce their albums and songs to strict concepts like “happy” or “sad”. Always beautiful, the band shifted modes and styles throughout the recordings with a freewheeling looseness that was guided by clear emotional precision. The sound Broken Social Scene conjured on that record, and their 2005 self-titled follow-up, was wholly distinct but elusive. Broken Social Scene is a canonical band whose canonical album, 2002’s You Forgot It in People, is one of the shining examples of early 2000s indie.
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