Broken Social Scene: Forgiveness Rock Record | CD review

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.