Broken Social Scene: "World Sick"

On “Epic Song”—er, “World Sick”—Broken Social Scene at last find the midpoint between the slickly produced rhythmic thrust of You Forgot it in People (2003) and the type of music a journeyman director with one foot in the indie crowd would play at the climax of a romantic comedy. This is Ryan-Philippe-standing-at-the-top-of-the-escalator-rock, Edward-Cullen-staring-moodily-out-of-a-train-rock. It is a big, hot, wet piffle. It is as refreshing as a Mountain Dew, and roughly as welcome. I do not drink Mountain Dew.

Perhaps the only interesting thing about it is how profoundly uninteresting it is, succumbing to the sort of production-bloat that crippled onetime weakerthans like Stars or I’m From Barcelona. Beneath all this orchestration is neither a song nor a jam, as if every component of the track along those lines was workshopped and sessioned out in some sort of refining post-production process, removing structural support until all that’s left is the frills. This is less a monument to ornamentation—as the band has seemed occasionally, thrillingly to be—than it is a pile of ornaments. And a couple of gigantic choruses, to be fair, but if we’re going to reduce a song to a single element that element ought to be a little more substantive than these choruses, which sound more like futbol fightsongs than, like, music.

But wevs, right? David Gray fans gotta rock out to something.

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