He has a darker side, of course, but when he's at his best …" "He brings out the best in people, he makes you feel loved and there's nothing artificial about it. "When Kevin is at his best, there's nothing like him," says Charles Spearin, Drew's longest-serving bandmate.
"It's my curse."ĭrew – who sports a beard, has a herniated disc in his back and is 40 – is also temperamental, depressive, funny and at the centre of attention. "I don't buy neighbourhoods, I build them," says the BSS member, but also the co-founder of Arts & Crafts, the band's label. Walking around the area with Drew in April, he laments not investing in real estate. It's the group that made Toronto sexy while Drake was still a student at In 2014, when Vogue magazine calls Toronto's West Queen West the world's second-coolest neighbourhood, some of that is because it's where Broken Social Scene partied in 1994. Because all of the BSS members make their own music – often together – and while some break out and some falter, the band is less like SNL and more like NBC, the network umbrella they all live under. Saturday Night Live, its most popular members having departed to make their own solo stabs at fame. The band, Broken Social Scene, hasn't been together onstage with new music in seven years and there's a double-album worth of reasons why. "Everyone has their own OCD ways of how they need to be treated, but these are the moments that get us together onstage." "I'm sitting there with all the kids, and no one knows who we are, no one cares, and I'm thinking: 'This is what we do,'" Drew says. There he is, sitting in the park with his friends, including musicians Leslie Feist, James Shaw and Emily Haines, drinking wine. Because I think we've always been a band that's been a celebration." True to his word, Drew and company have rendered Hug Of Thunder exactly that.One night in May, on the west side of Toronto, Kevin Drew is reminded of a feeling his band had back in 2002. In a recent interview, Broken Social Scene's de facto leader Kevin Drew cited the Paris terror attacks of 2015 as a wake-up call, one that spurred the group's return: "It just sort of made us want to get out there and play. That doesn't mean, however, the group isn't reacting to the less-than-ideal state of the world. Rather than angry, it's a bittersweet confection that dissolves into a breakneck bridge of soaring guitar heroics.
Similarly, the title of "Protest Song," one of the album's standout tracks, is not indicative of its sound. She's more downbeat, yet no less evocative, on the elegantly brooding "Victim Lover." "Gonna Get Better" belies its title by sticking to a subdued groove and a swirling, contemplative tone - the feeling of flipping through folders of old photos, letting the rush of memories come. A member of the offshoot AroarA with Broken Social Scene's Andrew Whiteman, she lends piercing elation to "Stay Happy," a burst of symphonic pop with a massive yet laid-back beat. When it comes to a mix of ethereality and strength, new vocalist Ariel Engle is no slouch. Later on, the album's celestial title track erupts into a typically majestic chorus, complete with lit-major attention to storytelling and symbolic detail, led by Broken Social Scene breakout star Leslie Feist who pulls off a Kate Bush-level of otherworldliness.
"Halfway Home" is an upward spiral of a song, buoyed by washes of orchestral euphoria and weightless, male-female harmonies worthy of My Bloody Valentine.
After an atmospheric instrumental opening harking all the way back to Feel Good Lost, the band kicks in with the anthems. The band has been mostly silent, studio-wise, since 2010's Forgiveness Rock Record - the various members of its loose-knit roster keep themselves busy in other high-profile acts such as Feist, Stars and Metric, not to mention the occasional solo album - but the Toronto collective is at last set to return with its fifth full-length, Hug Of Thunder (out July 7 on Arts & Crafts).įeaturing all 15 original members of the band (Broken Social Scene has never done minimal), Hug Of Thunder does not skimp. The group's ambient, experimental 2001 debut, Feel Good Lost gave way to the wide-angle vision of its 2002 breakthrough, You Forgot It In People, an album of giddy highs and moody lows. Courtesy of the artist Broken Social Scene, Hug Of Thunder.īefore taking a break of seven years from releasing albums, Broken Social Scene established itself as one of indie rock's most epic practitioners.
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