Broken Social Scene's Reunion Brought It All Back Home

I entered this month's Field Trip festival—a one-day event doubling as a tenth anniversary celebration for Toronto label Arts & Crafts—on the venue's west side, emerging under the shadow of a thicket of trees and the billboard that serves as Drake's stunt piece in this year's "Started from the Bottom" video, a giant sign hanging over Toronto's historic Fort York and Garrison Common. Drizzy's presence, even if only via nearby advertisement, felt appropriate on a day ripe with civic pride, since he's one of the few artists who can claim a level of Toronto ambassadorship equal to that of Field Trip's lynchpin act.

I'm talking about Broken Social Scene, the local collective that headlined Field Trip and without whom Arts & Crafts never would've existed. The band was formed in 1999 by Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning, cobbled together by members of several other Toronto indie rock groups like KC Accidental and By Divine Right, and released debut Feel Good Lost in 2001, a meandering ambient collection that didn't make much noise outside of the Toronto musical community. Their star exploded two years later, when sophomore effort You Forgot It in People exploded to international acclaim and success, largely on the back of an infamously effusive Pitchfork review. YFIIP took the textures and instrumentation of Feel Good Lost and subjected them to compression and refinement, yielding an indie rock record that revelled in a wide range of styles and was stuffed to the brim with indelible melodies and huge climaxes. It stands as the band's defining accomplishment today.

Arts & Crafts was co-founded by Drew and industry veteran Jeffrey Remedios in 2003 as a launching pad for You Forgot It in People, handling its wider release and artist management. The nascent label quickly became the platform for the solo releases and side projects that emerged from the BSS collective, pre-existing or no, including Feist, Stars, Jason Collett, and many more. Over the course of the next decade, A&C would expand to include artists who existed outside of the BSS crew—current examples include Bloc Party and Ra Ra Riot—and other Canadian cities, including Montreal. Ten years after the label was formed, all of the artists mentioned above and a few others came together to comprise the Field Trip lineup, capped off by the group that started it all.

As I took in set after set (and meal after meal), the web of connections linking all of A&C's artists began to emerge; in particular, it seemed like every performer could ultimately be traced back to Broken Social Scene, the monolith that couldn't help but hang over everyone's heads. Some, like secondary headliners Stars and Feist, were obviously tied to BSS: Leslie Feist has handled vocals for some of the band's most memorable songs ("Almost Crimes," "7/4 (Shoreline)"), and Stars members Torquil Campbell, Amy Millan, and Evan Cranley have all played and toured with the band at some point in its history. (Cranley even has an obscurity named in his honour, Feel Good Lost's closer "Cranley's Gonna Make It.") Others, like local rockers Zeus, needed secondary and tertiary links: they came together while serving as the backing band for BSS member Jason Collett before embarking on a career of their own. Finally, some of the other, younger members of the label (The Darcys, Cold Specks) are paying a quiet debt to BSS in their own way, either through sonic influence or by plying their trade within a Canadian music scene undeniably transformed by the band's success.

The presence of this connective web was also noted by Brendan Canning, who spoke to me last week before tucking into a performance with a youth band from Toronto's Regent Park School of Music for the city's Luminato cultural festival. While running through the festival's lineup and some of the performers who joined BSS for their closing set, he rattled off a fairly long list of names, ranging from well known to totally obscure. His ability to reel off such a wide range of people off the top of his head is a testament to the density of the scene surrounding Arts & Crafts, as well as the varying levels of success the members of the scene have enjoyed. Speaking to Canning also helped to link the community at large to the hometown label that put Field Trip together. He's received tons of positive feedback from Torontonians in the days and weeks since Field Trip: "Everything from different food vendors to the selection of bands—I was there early that day, I only stepped out to feed my dog and take him around the block, but other than that I was there from 1:30 on—top to bottom, it was just a very pleasant afternoon." (One example of a tiny, meaningful gesture: a bike valet service for attendee use, which came in handy for plenty of locals. Artists weren't excluded, either: among others, Feist and Canning biked to the festival from their nearby homes.) The city that fostered Broken Social Scene and its branches in their formative years is still right there, offering its support.

Perhaps all of this good will would've been compromised if the label's roster couldn't bring the heat; fortunately, everyone performing at Field Trip seemed to rise to the occasion. Early afternoon performers like Cold Specks, Zeus, and Hayden charmed dedicated attendees with tight, professional sets; imports like Bloc Party and Ra Ra Riot tore through their new material and their old hits with equal aplomb. Stars delivered a set full of their trademark hearty, hammy pop, pointing out nearby neighbourhoods that inspired fan favourites and infusing every cut with palpable joy and enthusiasm.

In the evening's penultimate slot, Feist reshaped and sculpted many of her most recognizable songs into new, refreshing forms: "My Moon My Man" as stark, dark pop, a dubbed out "Limit to Your Love" that read like a tip of the cap to James Blake's cover, an extended lead into "1 2 3 4" that was equal party glitchy and ethereal. Each bit of revision ultimately hung on that indelible voice, whether it was part of an earthy blend of harmonies or being chopped and spat from a console or simply there, drifting and sailing like a cloud getting tossed around by a stiff breeze. She was charismatic, witty, and a total thrill to watch.

And then before I knew it, the sky was dark and a meaty horn section was creating the blaring wave that caps off You Forgot It in People opener "Capture the Flag:" Broken Social Scene had reassembled for one last hurrah, ready and willing to plow through their magnum opus and a few more favourites for an adoring crowd. Even with the benefit of nearly three weeks' hindsight, I'm confident in saying that the set represented the band at their absolute best; a quick, informal poll of fellow attendees yielded a similar consensus, and Canning agreed: "[We] were able to deliver the kind of show that we needed to deliver that day." Every song was fist-pumpingly intense and fully realized, often more so than on record, from the epic swell and afterglow of "Lover's Spit" to the thudding bass line and wicked clutter of "Stars and Sons" to the kaleidoscopic swirl and roar of "Superconnected." Drummer Justin Peroff was a rock, anchoring a rhythm section that often had six or seven distinct players while axemen Andrew Whiteman and Sam Goldberg flew between frets and ripped off solos. Drew toed the line between inspiring leadership and his trademark goopy proselytizing surprisingly well; Canning cracked crooked grins and played the straight man as well as he always has. I think "7/4 (Shoreline)" caused an earthquake. It was an excellent show.

Of course, Broken Social Scene has never really been about just the music. Part of the fun of BSS has always been evaluating the web of connections between the players, sniffing out glances and grins, guessing at the history—Drew and Feist sharing a quick sidestage conversation, Whiteman and Canning lining up back to back and locking into a groove for the thousandth time, Torquil Campbell bouncing around the stage with a trumpet like an ADD-afflicted little brother. Metric's Jimmy Shaw showed up at the end of the set as the band was tucking into rarity "Jimmy and the Photocall," and Drew couldn't hide his genuine glee if he tried: "I wrote this song for him!" They all wear one or two decades of friendship like second skins. And then you find yourself thinking about your own tangled web of friends and lovers and the way they connect, slowly drawing close over time, the strands overlapping and sticking together.

More than almost any other band, Broken Social Scene is dependent on connections: the links between this band and that band, their constituent members, the label that was born out of their greatest achievement. The most important connection in the band's oeuvre might be the one between the collective and its parent city, Toronto the Good, a city whose formation and structure happens to mirror the band's. BSS was created in the wake of Toronto's provincially mandated amalgamation in 1998, a forced polygamous union that took six distinct municipalities—Toronto, York, East York, North York, Etobicoke, and Scarborough—and mashed them together into a single megacity. The unified city has encountered problems new and old along the way, but even cynical commentators would agree that Toronto has only risen since amalgamation. A group of interconnected individuals brought together, yielding a messy whole greater than the sum of its parts—sounds familiar, doesn't it?

When asked about his plans for the future now that Broken Social Scene has retreated back into hiatus mode, Canning listed a handful of upcoming projects: his aforementioned Luminato performances with the local youth band, an upcoming multimedia venture that'll come to light as the summer progresses, a new solo record due in the fall. He also took a moment to mention some of Drew's summer plans, including a stint as the program directory of an independent music residency in the Western Canada resort town of Banff, Alberta. The individual parts that make up BSS have all returned to their own pursuits in time for a busy, sticky summer, but not before drawing in even distant bits of the web for Field Trip. They started from the bottom, too. And for one more wonderful night, they were here.

Jamieson Cox lives in Canada, and also on the internet. He's on Twitter - @jamiesoncox