| Pitchfork |
 Forgiveness is not a sentiment often associated with rock music. Anger, despair, infatuation, sure. But forgiveness is more complicated, and tougher to fit into a four-minute song. Broken Social Scene know all about heartbreak-- they've spent most of the last decade crafting songs about it with almost unparalleled zeal. Their story is filled with scurrilous encounters, backstabbings, and break-ups on par with most 70s arena-rockers, and they've crashed and rebuilt so many times that it's nearly impossible to keep of track who was where at any given moment. But they've also used that flexibility to their advantage: Their epochal 2002 breakout You Forgot It In People was the joyous sound of friends banding together to boost each other up, while 2005's Broken Social Scene was the dizzying sound of friends fizzing out into solo endeavors and outside pursuits.
Now they're back, and they're forgiving. Who, exactly? Each other, loves, bad decisions, humanity at large, worse decisions, the past, the future, culture, corporations, art, you, me, maybe even George W. Bush. (Well, maybe not him.) And while a 59-minute absolution session sounds excessive for even the most devout fans, Broken Social Scene aren't just throwing out hail marys here. Because forgiveness is hard, especially for a group this grand and this intertwined for this long. The album lets bygones go while acknowledging the pain and discipline involved, and does so while keeping with the band's indie-mixtape rep. There's a song that sounds like Pavement, one that sounds like the Sea and Cake (featuring Sea and Cake singer Sam Prekop), another like a Broadway adaptation of Children of Men, a weightless ballad that may double as an ode to masturbation, and a song that's basically five minutes of atmospheric pop perfection. Their ambition is intact....full text |
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| Guardian |
| The multi-headed beast that is Toronto collective Broken Social Scene has produced some of the great city's finer moments over the last decade, and provided a home from home for the likes of Leslie Feist and Metric's Emily Haines. Both feature here on the band's fourth proper record (solo LPs by Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning carried BSS branding) alongside Pavement's Spiral Stairs, DFA1979's Sebastien Grainger and lots of others. This crowdsourcing works, though. There's nary a dud here, and, given studious listening, the layers and twitches of the album reveal themselves, particularly in Art House Director, a tale of a struggling film set to a gloriously punchy chorus. Then there's the Eno-like instrumental Meet Me in the Basement which sounds like a call to arms for a certain type of pallid T-shirt-wearing music fan. It's fantastic, as is so much of Forgiveness Rock Record, a collation of so many talents that it's practically bursting at the seams....full text |
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| Consequenceofsound |
It’s hard to get to know a band like Broken Social Scene. With a revolving cast of players both on and off the stage, each of the previous records seem to be a snapshot of the imperfect and slightly chaotic times they’ve experienced. It’s been five years now since the collective has released a record, but with a band that’s constantly changing, it’s not so hard to see how time could slip by. Now on their long-awaited fourth record, something has changed, the quiet chaos of the past has subsided a bit, creating an order that’s given us their most concise effort to date. Now down to a core of six members, Broken Social Scene’s Forgiveness Rock Record is everything you would want: expansive, positive, a little dramatic, and always interesting at every turn. All the staples of their best work come out in full form, leaving you with nothing to pass over and another amazing record for this year.
Internal changes aside, the music has retained a level of consistency that has become the band’s signature. Even when experimenting on songs that make it hard to see the forest beyond the trees, they are still undoubtedly BSS. On their best work, though, they created timeless post-rock anthems filled with rich textures made up of simple but inescapable layers. Recorded in a way that’s in limbo between a big studio and a home computer, the songs sound crisp while remaining deeply intimate. Forgiveness takes that intimacy one step further, focusing more on accessibility than wondering experimentation. With a tighter group now involved, it seems the songs have taken that shape as well....full text |
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