Kirstiecat | Blog

(Metro 10/28/5)

Playing to a sold out audience, Broken Social Scene were at their best, even if lead singer Kevin Drew was feeling under the weather (I dare say he might get over his cold sooner if he held off a bit on the boozing and smoking though.). I had seen Broken Social Scene play at Intonation Festival and this show was about a hundred times better. (Btw, if you click on that link for pics and a short review, do know that you will have to scroll halfway down the page) I think the indoor setting did wonders for them.

Now, the thing about Broken Social Scene is that seeing them is sort of like opening up a fortune cookie. Because, you could get a fortune that says something helpful but not particularly satisfying like, “The way to mimimize a problem is to anticipate it and prevent it.” It’s still great because, after all, it’s a fortune. But it definitely pales in comparison to getting a fortune that reads, Somebody Misses You. So sometimes when you see Broken Social Scene, they bring along Emily Haines (also in Metric) or Amy Millan (also in The Stars) or sometimes as in the case of Friday night it’s Leslie Feist. At Intonation, it was Amy and this time it was Feist with a new female singer named Lisa (honestly, it sounded like he introduced her as Lisa Loeb. If anyone knows exactly what her last name is, do tell) He also had members of Do Make Say Think and Apostle of Hustle this time as well with at times 11 members on stage.

It goes without saying that they have a very full sound live and they sang a good mix of songs with older songs first and then quite a few songs off of the new s/t album including “Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day),” which incidentally sounds quite like a Pavement song to me, especially during the parts Kevin sings. “7/4 (Shoreline)” came off nicely withe Feist’s vocals coming off better live than on album., where they are a bit too buried in the mix for my liking. “Major Label Debut” was also a highlight of the set, with a slightly more rocking version of it than on album; more so like the version on the extra ep to the self titled album sans banjo. “Fire Eye’d Boy” was pretty consistent with the studio recording. Lisa and Leslie Feist’s vocals worked nicely together on “Bandwitch.” Overall musically besides more prominent vocals, the horns seemed a bit more frequent and prominent live and added quite a bit to the songs. They played for two hours and ended with “It’s All Gonna Break” on an encore performance.

In addition, Kevin’s banter was pretty lively. He invited everyone to Canada and reminded us that in Canada there is socialized medicine and no George Bush. He then proceeded to go on a tangent about how Bush is really everyhere now and sing an imprpmptu song about the Bush twins. At another point, he explained how excited he was to be playing the Metro in Chicago because Chicago has such great bands…like Tortoise and the Sea and Cake and Cheap Trick and Papa M and (jokingly) Zwan. He followed the groans up with, “We all make mistakes.”

Click for more pics. including some with Feist on stage as well.

The above two pics were towards the end of the song, “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl”

Definitely a more blurry photo but I still liked it.

This is the new singer Lisa. Terrible picture I know but she was always standing at the other end of the stage.

It’s a bit hard to see but you can barely see Feist’s white outfit and brown hair peeking out from the right hand side of Kevin. There were a couple of really sweet minutes while they were dancing together on stage.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 30th, 2005 at 11:33 am and is filed under music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.