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It was a soaring number filled with open chords, massive harmonies and open chords. There’s always a Mouth Guards of the Apocalypse to celebrate genuine human connection, there’s always a Halfway Home to carouse the overcoming of adversity, and there’s always this album to remind you of how fucking beautiful music can be.Seven years after the release of ‘Forgiveness Rock Record’, all the original members of Canadian collective Broken Social Scene, alongside new guest vocalist Ariel Engle, emerged with ‘Halfway Home’. The point is, this thing isn't actually about nothing, it's about how togetherness is meant to be celebrated and about how there is always a song to accompany that celebration. Someone chimes in with a plodding bassline others respond politely, reassuringly with a mosaic of ambient squeaks and squawks. The title track, a sort of aesthetic counterpoint to Halfway Home, has the entire collective gather providently around Leslie Feist (!!!) for a hushed recount of pointillistic nostalgia. Please Take Me With You waves bittersweet from the terminal and Stay Happy is there waiting, weeks later, with a toothy grin and a welcome home sign.Īnd lo, even in moments of levity, there is that cogent spirit of communion.
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It runs through emotions like a breathless person wandering through an airport, capturing that very human dichotomy - it’s exciting to see the world, but it’s just as exciting to see your family again. On the subject of home: such a vital sense of family means this record starts and ends in the same place. Scene offshoots (a society in itself) return home to find that their old room has been left untouched out of fondness for their memory. Leaders are only “semi-leaders”, the process is a democratic one. I think it’s because Hug of Thunder is the product of unity, not hierarchy. Staggering, maybe, but standing nonetheless. Which, again, begs the question: How on Earth did the band do it? Halfway Home, the lofty and indomitable thing that it is, feels touched by every personality that has passed through the revolving door of BSS members since their inception, and it stays standing. I said I’d be succinct, but I couldn’t possibly organise my thoughts on this record neatly.
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It stays that way for 52 minutes – 15 members, 7 years, a million ideas proliferating and rattling against each other with fervour and not a tangible destination in mind. Of course, if you are skeptical of the ensemble’s attempts to bring everything and everyone together, holding hands on the same plane, the record materialises with Sol Luna - Sun and Moon - the band extending their embrace around the cosmic details. Towering, a celebration of nothing and yet, a far-reaching approximation of the human condition. It is above us yet looking down empathetically. It isn’t part of a dialogue and it sure as hell isn’t trapped in the same languid delirium that you (I) are (am). Hug of Thunder will never exist solely unto you. There aren’t enough metaphors cobbled together in the English language to explain why something so vast, so patently spirited, can push against its threadbare seams without spilling out over the ideas it stemmed from, but brevity can’t even begin to illustrate it either. Like the objects in my car’s broken rear-view mirror, these looming pieces of music shake and swell, focus and unfocus so obviously stitched together by a band that simply should not work. My experiences with Broken Social Scene – temperamental or otherwise – always remain to make things bigger more triumphant. Broken Social Scene are that band: a band that thinks in spectrums, that makes a point of filling the gaps left behind, a band that considers and creates everything. Every season, every reaction to every experience, every fleeting moment spent on top of the world is captured and distilled by these songs. Let’s begin at a distance, then: Hug of Thunder has seen it all – every tectonic societal shift, every paradise and every tragedy has been a part of its purview. Review Summary: hey Sput user, you're still like family to me no matter what you leave down there in the comments