Based around the hub of Toronto's City's Arts & Crafts label, BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE'S floating pool of musicians (17 can be drawn upon in all) recalls the evolving, collaborative process favoured by equally disparate outfits such as Willard Grant Conspiracy and the magnificent Hidden Cameras.
And, stealthily, BSS are carving out an influential niche for themselves too. Their debut album "You Forgot It In People" crept out in 2002 and is now widely renowned as the sleeping star which helped light the way for bands such as The Arcade Fire, Stars, Death From Above 1979, Black Mountain and more.
"Ibi Dreams Of Pavement (A Better Day"), meanwhile, is an intriguing taster for BSS'S due-any-day-now eponymous second. It may or may not be about either Mr.Malkmus's honchos or Canadian author Ibi Kaslik (buggered if I can tell, to be honest) but it's surely one livid and exilarating four and a half minutes full of excitable rolling drums, electric and acoustic wires tingling and tangling, warped out'n'shrieking vocals and the band carrying a shoegazing undertow with them into harbour with stabs of brass shooting from the spume along the way. Not revolutionary in any sense, but tantalising enough certainly. Some more soon please.
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