Peer Validated

Pictured: There’s a lot of pressure on my picture titling right now. I just can’t…

Kevin Drew is one of two founding members of mega-collaborate, Broken Social Scene. His guitar work and scratchy, low-fi vocals have blended in with the creativity of around 20 other musicians to make some of the best post-rock music of this early century. The group’s latest offering acts as a spotlight for Drew. Where he was a line or shape that contributed to a pattern in BBS’s previous releases, he is the entirety of a painting itself on Spirit If…, having only used his fellow contributors to fill in the white spaces he left.

This is at least somewhat apparent in the songs, as they come off, for better or worse, much more straight forward then what we’d expect from the group. The songs seems a bit ‘normalized,’ but that might also mean ‘more listenable,’ for a whole crowd of people, which could be a good move for one of the most abstract projects in indie music. Either way, Spirit If…, is thought-provoking, with a wide range of sounds and ideas diffused over 13 fuzzy tracks. Farewell to the Pressure Kids is an epic first track that we’ve come to expect from Broken Social Scene, with walls of reverby guitars and big cymbal splashes. The comparison and contradiction between songs like the acoustic-guitar and banjo driven Safety Bricks, and the punk-rock, Clash-esque, Back Out On The…, exaggerate the extremes on the album, while Drew keeps the same highly-emotional and dramatic attitudes throughout.

Broken Social Scene Presents Kevin Drew - Farewell To The Pressure Kids

The aforementioned Farewell to the Pressure Kids! There’s about a minute of heavy breathing in the middle. I promise, it’s really good when it all comes back in again.