Thursday 16/02/06 Broken Social Scene @ The Irish Centre, Leeds

“How much time do we have?” Kevin Drew enquires after a string-bustingly fierce finale to another sprawling workout has brought the proceedings to a temporary halt. “Oh,” the singer-guitarist quips after being told the curfew’s 60 minutes away, a hint of worry darkening his affableness as the rest of the band strike up a reggae-tinged rhythm. “That’s not long at all.” For most bands, an hour would be plenty. Drew and his compatriots, however, have already been immersing the charmingly moth-bitten Irish Centre, where tonight’s gig has been upgraded from the less sizable Faversham due to a feverish demand for tickets, in their brand of pandemonium for more than one and a half hours. War And Peace, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the gaps between Guns ‘N’ Roses records – they all go on for half an eternity, but these are short sprints when placed next to the marathon that is a Broken Social Scene gig.

 

All of which would be unreservedly ace did the hotly tipped Toronto-based collective, who’ve trimmed their 16-member extravaganza, culled from various torchbearers of Canada’s fertile art-rock underground – Stars, Metric, Feist and so on – and heard in all its chaotic glory on the band’s superb self-titled third album, to a relatively restricted 9-piece for this tour, have a bulging portfolio of first-rate material to draw from. Rather than songcraft, however, their forte is moulding a disorientating overload of detail emerging from a multitude of instruments and voices struggling to be heard into something unique and, at best, intoxicating. Replicating the free-form fug of the happiest accidents arising from such head-on experimentation – the euphoric swirl of ‘Fire Eye’d Boy’, say, or the sustained rush of ruckus that is ‘Ibi Dreams of Pavement (Better Days)’ - turns out to be beyond the band’s reach tonight, whilst the more underwhelming offerings remain modest indie-rock no matter how many violin and horn parts, spacey vocal echoes or improvisational de-tours to jam-populated noodlesville are thrown at them.

 

Just when you’re ready to dismiss the live version of Broken Social Scene as an indie Grateful Dead, a hoary hippy outfit famed for a paucity of top-drawer tunes and an inability to grasp the concept of momentum, they pull out a sparkling gem. The pounding, hook-laden ‘7/4 (Shoreline)’, the wonky falsetto-funk of ‘Hotel’, a hypnotic ‘Bandwitch’, which locates the fragile ache buried beneath layers of impenetrable murk on the album, or a pulsating ‘Major Label Debut’, for example, are all worth wading though the acres of tentative twiddling elsewhere. To further compensate for sore feet, missed buses and the occasional tested patience, the bands high-spirited approach, plentiful of banter and heckler-friendly audience participation, replaces the cooler-than-thou frowns of indie elitism with hearty grins and big dollops of fun. With an inclusive party atmosphere like this, it’s no wonder neither the band or the audience are in a hurry to vacate the premises.

 

At last, after a two and a half hour indecisive battle between quantity and quality, they close the shop, although were it not for the curfew they’d probably still be at it, digging out half-forgotten single d-sides and indulging in the odd bass solo. The final entry on the endless setlist, appropriately, is ‘It’s All Gonna Break’ – the last song on the new album, and an unashamedly extended epic to boot.