It was supposed to be the best day of the summer, as it was proclaimed between the sets on the large screens, and Broken Social Scene had bought the slogan, since they are definitively a band that was made for festivals.
The setting sun during their set at the FYF was definitively helping the festive side, bringing beautiful colors as the stage lights went on. The Canadian band built their usual thick guitar-driven wall of sound, combining with it the sound of many other instruments, a trumpet here, more percussion there, a quite exotic bass line over there, more weird electronic noises, and laser-bean-like strident guitar lines, composing unique songs with a strange structure.
Their guitar assaults turning into heavy grooves, were certainly well served by the 7 or 9 of them on stage depending on the songs, and these bright melodies were escaping from this dense screen of sound. Their baroque-grandiose sound was quieter when there were vocals, but everything was about layers and layers and the chaos they created was extremely well received by the crowd.
They went on with their set during which nobody was exactly a frontman, and many members were constantly changing positions and instruments, although Kevin Drew was on vocals for most of the songs, Some songs I have caught: ‘Cause = Time’, ‘Gang Bang Suicide’, ‘Meet me in the basement’, ‘It’s All Going to Break’, ‘Texico Bitches’, and they also covered Modest Mouse’s ‘The World At Large’.
I have read somewhere that Feist had a secret show the night before in Venice Beach, but she did not show up during FYF fest.
Then there was this declaration from Drew:
‘This is the last time we will play in LA for a long, long, long time’, they insisted on the ‘long’ and they thanked the LA audience for always having supported them and ‘giving [them] many years of great memories’. ‘This is for you’ they said at the end of the show…. What was that? Are they retiring?