BLOWIN' INDIE WIND

Author: BENJAMIN GOLZE

"Accept the insanity...convince the others it's a dance party...embrace the distortion...try to 'control' the 'confusion'...make sure ghosts doesn't sound like goats."

So read the liner notes to "Broken Social Scene," the long-awaited third album from the Canadian band of the same name. The group achieved indie rock stardom with their 2002 sophomore album, "You Forgot It in People," where they tied the instrumental-heavy dreamscapes of their debut into a collection of incredible rock songs that seemingly overflowed with sound. As the liner notes show, the band has traded in the relative precision of their previous album for a sprawling, less immediately accessible sound that attempts to fill up your stereo's speakers with any noise it can possibly produce. The coherence overrides the confusion, however, making "Broken Social Scene" one of the best recent albums and a worthy successor to the group's earlier work.

Broken Social Scene has always been a large band - they describe themselves as a "network" - but in the intervening three years since "You Forgot It in People," the number of members has jumped from a previously rowdy seven to a decidedly crowded 17. The sheer amount of musicians is immediately apparent on the album's first two tracks, especially on "Ibi Dreams of Pavement," where an early explosion of guitars leads into a mish-mash of shouted vocals, effects and what sounds like two drum sets.

However messy that sounds, the whole manages to be greater than the sum of its parts, as is evident on "7/4 (Shoreline)," which is easily the album's best track. The song begins with rolling drums and a prominent bass line which provides the foundation for dreamy vocals to build into a climax crammed with guitars, horns and every kind of percussion imaginable. The lyrics themselves are nearly unintelligible - the chorus repeats "It's coming on hard" or "It's coming on high." Whichever it is, it doesn't matter; either one would be pretty suitable to the sheer volume that the band produces.

"Fire Eye'd Boy" and "Superconnected" fall into the same classic Broken Social Scene vein - loud, large and upbeat. But the band also taps several other genres en route, such as electronic environment on "Hotel" and hip-hop vibe on the jumbled "Windsurfing Nation." The beat from the second segues into the fantastic "Swimmers" ("You Forgot It in People" fans think "Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl"), where overlaid vocals from one of the group's female members sail on top of a Pacific groove from bass and horns.

In all, "Broken Social Scene" flows nicely, and the continuity is threatened only twice on the laid-back jam "Handjobs for the Holidays" and the eerie "Bandwitch," both which are simply too long. The latter is a sparse, confusing track that takes seven minutes to get to where it's going, which seems to be nowhere. Several critics have jumped on "Broken Social Scene" as overextending the band's sound. Both of these songs show what happens when the group is unable to rein in their eccentricities.

On the other hand, their closer "It's All Gonna Break" saves the album from that last stumbling block and shows that Broken Social Scene can, in fact, extend its enormity over a song of fairly epic 10-minute-length. The song's notes read, "try to sound like Bob Seger on acid." It is hard to say what that means exactly, but every time the singer shouts "it's all gonna break" and the band crashes into an outburst of blaring horns and swirling guitars, you will realize that with music this good it is hard to care.