![]() The leaner, meaner road version these days is an eight-piece, featuring newcomer (and Whiteman’s partner in life, parenthood and the band AroarA) Ariel Engle holding down the many female vocal parts sung over the years by Feist, Millan, Haines and Lisa Lobsinger. ![]() The gang will be back in Toronto opening for Montreal’s Arcade Fire at the Air Canada Centre on Nov. The demands of touring, of course, have once again decreed that Broken Social Scene - which made a rather triumphant return to the Toronto stage with pretty much its entire membership on board last month at the Field Trip festival - must carry on in somewhat “normal” band fashion as it honours dates on both sides of the Atlantic through the summer and fall seasons. And when you have nothing to lose, that’s kinda when the freedom of creation takes over.” “Obviously, there are always frustrations with everything we do, but if you take the time with it and you have enough time, which we just said we did - we just declared that we had as much time as we wanted - then you really have nothing to lose. “And I just think when you’re trying to make something as a group, you don’t really get in the way of yourself because you’re trying to do something with everyone and you’ve got so much respect personally and musically for the people you’re working with that it’s exciting - it’s exciting to watch Justin (Peroff) drum and Charlie coming up with lines with Whitey (Andrew Whiteman) and Brendan and then the horns come in and the ladies come in. “I have seven love stories with every member in this operation,” says Drew, down the line from Los Angeles. Everyone just let the music come as it came. Although gentle prodding to get something concrete down on tape would come from producer Joe Chiccarelli (Spoon, the Strokes, the Shins), management and the band’s affiliated label, Arts & Crafts, there was no deadline and no clear course of action set down. Helping matters was the fact that BSS had been away long enough this time to not be burdened by the expectations of a “massive return,” says Drew. ![]() “You know, we’ve made lots of decisions that weren’t always the right decisions. “I think traditional ‘band’ things kinda creep in when you start looking at other bands and you think, ‘Oh, we should be doing something more like them’ or ‘How come we’re not afforded that?’” opines Canning over a beer on King West. The result, the new Hug of Thunder - released this Friday - is Broken’s finest album since You Forgot It In People, a lush, eccentric and frequently euphoric collection of tunes that recaptures much of the anything-goes spirit of that breakthrough that got crowded out when success prompted it to start overthinking and behaving more like a “band” band circa Forgiveness Rock Record. They jammed a bunch of new tunes out in guitarist Charles Spearin’s garage and then set about recording them in co-founder Brendan Canning’s living room, letting the usual enormous cast of characters - de facto frontman and other original member Kevin Drew, Leslie Feist, Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw of Metric, Amy Millan and Evan Cranley of Stars among them - come and go as they saw fit. Thus, when the mood within the Scene once again felt conducive to actually making another album, the group’s first since 2010’s Forgiveness Rock Record, this ragtag gang of old friends simply decided not to stress about trying to impose traditional rules of studio conduct on its art and made a return, of sorts, to the anti-formula that first propelled it to international attention with 2002’s accidental classic You Forgot It In People. On the other, trying to get anything accomplished is often the musical equivalent of herding cats, with a multiplicity of ideas and egos and logistical horrors endlessly tugging it in as many directions as there are human beings onstage and in the studio. On the one hand, the Toronto indie-rock troupe’s loose definition of what it is to be a band - at present, as many as 17 members can drift in and out of the fold at any given time - is the root of its unpredictable, multi-voiced and artfully shambolic appeal. Broken Social Scene doesn’t operate like other bands, which is both a blessing and a curse.
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