Broken Social Scene: Cause=Time
Updated: Sep 2
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All the Feelings is the name of the tour Broken Social Scene, the Canadian indie rock collective, are about to embark on in the coming weeks as they play Manchester, Glasgow and London. Hearing about this tour made me think of two of their tracks I used to listen to on repeat in the late noughties. The first was 'Shoreline' and the other was 'Cause=Time' (see above).
All the Feelings is an apt name for a band whose music trades on, well, vibes. Now, this is a word, vibes, which has risen to ubiquity in recent years, and yet isn't it actually quite a good one to describe the vast majority of indie rock? Most indie rock is nothing if not vibes. And vibes are all well and good, for a while, but after a while as listeners we want more than vibes from our music but something to go back to and listen again. Vibes equal immediacy, and while immediacy in art is important (in my humble opinion it is, anyway) we cannot live by vibes alone, and there has to be something structurally or compositionally inventive going on to keep us going and keep us coming back. The vast majority of indie rock songs never get out of first gear, and plod along nicely, perhaps featuring a chorus which is slightly louder in volume. In short, a lot of it sounds quite nice for a bit but is formally pretty dull and just doesn't quite stand the test of time. I'd love to say all of Broken Social Scene's music is different, but a) I haven't listened to enough of it, and b) from what I have listened to, it does suffer from the aforementioned vibey plod.
But, if we're going to do vibey plodding on Sound Bites we may as well look for the best vibey plodding, with as their tour title suggests, All the Feelings. So, I hereby offer you Cause=Time, or indeed, as previously mentioned Shoreline. Cause=Time, to be fair, while it does feature a good bit of vibey plodding, it's a track that seems aware of its own vibey plodding as, at about 2 minutes in, it offers something a bit more explosive and dynamic and surprises us. The classic verse/chorus/verse/chorus/middle eight structure is most certainly eschewed in this one and to good effect. More interestingly, actually, it's a song of two halves, a mellow first half that gives way to a rip-roarer of a riff and a few other twists and turns and echoes in the second half. Indeed, now I come to think about it, it is slightly reminiscent of the sonnet in how it sets up a first part, before shifting to something different about halfway through, using a volta, or a turn. Perhaps it's this poetic structure that draws me to this track, (the sonnet comes from the Italian word 'sonneto' meaning little sone after all. Or perhaps it's just All the Feelings, and memories of sitting in my little room at St Andrews, looking down South Street through my little window in my student accommodation, as I worked on a poem to take to the weekly workshop, or maybe it was sitting up late to finish an essay. Either way, some tracks take us right back, not just to a place but also an atmosphere, and this track does just that. All the Feelings, indeed.
