Remember The Humans

For a certain kind of person raises hand, You Forgot It in People and Broken Social Scene are the two indie rock records of the 2000s. The Toronto collective's 2002 breakthrough and its 2005 self-titled follow-up were the sound of an entire city's worth of musicians piling into a room with a producer named David Newfeld and figuring out, in real time, how many ideas a single song could hold without falling apart. Horns clashing with guitars. Choirs of friends piling onto every chorus. Newfeld's job, by all accounts, was less about traditional production than about letting chaos happen on tape and then carving something coherent out of the wreckage. He didn't work on a Broken Social Scene record for the next 21 years. Remember The Humans, out today on Arts & Crafts, is the first time the band has been in a room with him since.

The story of how it happened is the kind of thing you wouldn't believe if you saw it in a film. Newfeld moved into Kevin Drew's Toronto neighborhood. They started talking again, then started working again, and over the course of making this record, both men lost their mothers. "Our moms would have wanted us to do this, and get it right after 20 years of not working together," Drew said when the record was announced. You can hear all of it on the album. Opener "Not Around Anymore" eases in with woodwinds tuning up, then a gently strummed Strat, then Drew's weathered voice telling you "there's no need to fight here anymore." It's the most Broken Social Scene opening to a Broken Social Scene record since 7/4 (Shoreline). Newfeld's signature is everywhere: drums floating through the stereo spectrum, horns weaving around guitars without ever stepping on them, a rhythm section that sits low and patient while Hannah Georgas takes the lead on "Only The Good I Keep" and Leslie Feist drifts in and out of the mix like a ghost you've been waiting to see again. The whole thing was tracked across four studios (Dobbstown North, The Bathouse, Lost Tin Rooster, and Levels) with Charles Spearin as associate producer and additional engineering, and Emily Lazar handled the master at The Lodge.

A lot of indie reunion records suffer from over-polishing, the urge to sand down the rough edges that made the original work special. Newfeld and the band do the opposite. Remember The Humans keeps the signature tension between intimacy and chaos: a song will build from a whisper to a multi-vocal full-band roar, and just when you think it's going to fall apart, a flute or a flugelhorn slides in and resolves the whole thing. Closer "Parking Lot Dreams" features a high-octave bass poking through a haze of strummed acoustics and atmospheric strings, with Drew unfurling sad-sounding lines about a "death vacation" and a body "in heat." It feels enormous even when hardly anything is happening. Twenty-one years is a long time to be apart from a collaborator whose fingerprints define your most beloved work, and Remember The Humans doesn't pretend the gap didn't happen. It sounds like a band and a producer in their fifties, figuring out what they want to say to each other now. Put on the headphones. Let it swallow you whole. Remember why you loved them in the first place.

“: "Twenty-one years is a long time to be apart from a collaborator whose fingerprints define your most beloved work."”