Oct. 21 – After wading through the sea of cars filled with people adorned in orange and ornamented with whatever Tennessee Volunteer paraphernalia vs. UT game would stick to it (the Alabama vs. UT game had just let out), I made my way to the newly renovated Bijou Theatre in downtown Knoxville for the critically acclaimed Broken Social Scene in hopes of filling a night with something meaningful and real. I am a bit unsure of what I got.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney once wrote, “I can get by with a little help from my friends,” and that is just what Broken Social Scene and Do Make Say Think do. Both bands are some sort of amalgamation of the other and it seems as if every member has another side-project or solo project that involves mostly the same people. This makes Broken Social Scene and Do Make Say Think ideal tour mates. However it doesn’t always make for a pleasurable concert experience.
Do Make Say Think finally took to the stage an hour late due to the aforementioned sea of orange moving through Knoxville like a pack of bulls through Pamplona. The instrumental band presented waves of ambience that could soothe your soul one second and send you into a fit of ire the next. One song would flow into the next producing a cohesive show until the witless onstage banter would begin. “First impressions of this city, you like football and you are not so keen on gays,” Do Make Say Think multi-instrumentalist Charles Spearin said. “However there is a Gay St. so maybe it is on the fence.” These nonsensical comments continued throughout the night, each one dumber than the last, and marred an otherwise brilliant set of five songs.
After the stage was moved around a bit the members of Broken Social Scene began to wander out onto the stage where some of them had been just minutes earlier. At times the cross-band mishmash brought about transcendent versions of songs like “7/4 Shoreline” and “Fire Eye’d Boy” from Broken Social Scene’s 2005 self-titled album and enjoyable moments when the crowd was invited on stage to dance during “Hotel.” Throughout the show a fan kept yelling “Smooth like Knoxville!” only to be countered with, “What is that? A sexual thing, like a handjob with a hand full of grits?” At other times the results of the collaboration ended up being nothing more that cluttered derivative jams that fell short of what they could be.
Like Do Make Say Think, Broken Social Scene’s set was plagued with random nonsensical banter – it seemed as if, like in life, getting by with a little help from your friends can have some disadvantages. Throughout the set Broken Social Scene looked to be more involved with drinking, chatting with each other and making themselves laugh than they were playing the music the fans came there to hear. As the wine flowed onstage things just seemed to get worse when lead singer Kevin Drew and one of the other members of BSS broke into what I am assuming was suppose to be a comical skit parodying PBS’s “Actor’s Studio” where Drew interviewed the member about things that never happened in their fictional film career from sex scenes with Jon Voight to Morissey to (insert other random childish joke here).
Later on Drew said that BSS was going to be on hiatus from touring for a while and it may be just as well – maybe by the time they return their minds will be back on the music and off of whatever it is distracting them from putting on the show they are capable of.

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