March 24, 2010

belief-suspending

This is the SxSW performance of Broken Social Scene featuring Emily Haines from Metric[1] that Ana Marie Cox blogged about at GQ.com.[2]

Broken Social Scene play a form of semi-experimental rock music that involves several guitars, an unusually-deployed horns section and, from what I could tell from the audience, two computers. They call themselves a “collective” and it’s quite a collection. At one point there were thirteen people on stage, which seemed impressive until I Googled them and found out their “full” membership is 15.

And yet for all their size, they still sounded kind of small. The addition of one more person halfway through the show, however, seemed to double their size. Emily Haines of Metric (featured on Gossip Girl!) gave the band a jolting energy transfusion for one electric, belief-suspending song. I had to look up the name of that song – “Anthems for a 17-year-old Girl” – but I’m never going to forget it.

Seeing Metric tonight in Oakland. Looking forward to it.

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[2] Yes, I’ve now posted that link twice. Sue me.