[live review] Broken Social Scene and Sea and Cake at the House of Blues 09.17.10

There are two things I learned about Broken Social Scene from their Friday night show at the House of Blues. The first is that Kevin Drew is a trouper. The closest thing BSS has to a front-man, Drew admitted to the crowd upon taking the stage that he was suffering from MSG-induced allergic reaction thanks to some bad Asian food he had eaten earlier in the day (he disclosed the culprits, but I'll spare them the negative press). Apparently he was running a temperature, his face swelled up, and he even suffered minor hallucinations. But yet, he was still out there surfing on/giving much love to the crowd.

Which brings me to the second educational touchstone of Friday's show: this band fucking loves our city. Like, a lot. Having read Jonathan Donaldson's recent feature, I started heading for the exit following the rousing instrumental "Meet Me in the Basement", based on the article's cue that they've been closing shows with this track all summer. But then they reemerged for a 30-minute encore that included essential cuts like "Looks Just Like the Sun" and "Pacific Theme," and Drew informed us they'd be running right through the venue's midnight curfew, even instructing us to chant along "Fuck you! I won't do what you tell me!" à la Rage Against the Machine during the wholly appropriate "Ibi Dreams of Pavement." The feeling that they'd shown some extra love to Boston had me feeling all warm inside. Until I checked setlist.fm and saw they played basically the same show the next night in NYC. But hey, it's the thought that counts.

Pseudo-admiration aside, they put on a marathon of a two-hour show that made me reconsider my original stance on their recent Forgiveness Rock Record, which I initially mistook as bland in comparison to their previous two. Typically, if a band plays 11 of the 14 tracks off their new album, bitching is inevitable. But BSS were able to breathe some serious life into these tunes -- "Sweetest Kill" was both detached and melodious, "Ungrateful Little Father" was impossible not to sing along with, and even "World Sick" was able to shake its contrived preachiness to become the anthem it's always aimed to be.



My only knowledge of opener Sea and Cake heading into the show was through their ties to the ever-extending BSS family: drummer John McEntire produced the aforementioned FRR and the two bands will be releasing a split 7" sometime before year's end. So it was little surprise that they shared a similar scraggly folk sound, but obviously to a much thinner degree, with only a measly four members in Sea and Cake when compared to the nine that filled the stage for much of BSS's set. Finding out that McEntire is a member of Tortoise was also rather unsurprising. The group was able to latch onto a couple of loopy jazz riffs later on in their outing that called to mind Tortoise and provided a jaunty warm-up for the headliners, but ultimately would've been better served within the confines of an intimate club instead of the cavernous House of Blues.