There is a moment near the end of “Texico Bitches” — the choral swell has already happened twice, your brain expects it to stop, and then it simply doesn’t — where Broken Social Scene remember that they are, at their best, completely unmanageable.
Swimming Pool Suite is an EP, technically. Three tracks, roughly twenty-two minutes, released in August 2010 between the sprawling ambition of Forgiveness Rock Record and the long quiet that followed. But calling it a footnote would be like calling a long summer evening a footnote to the week.
What They Built Here
Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning assembled a version of the collective that still numbered in the dozens by this point — Amy Millan and Emily Haines passing vocal lines between them like they were sharing a cigarette, Charles Spearin threading in the kind of horn line that takes you three listens to isolate. The sessions overlapped with Forgiveness Rock Record work in Toronto, and you can hear the excess energy of a band that had more ideas than one album could hold being redirected into something looser and less goal-oriented.
The production is wet, deliberately so. Things bloom slowly and stay wet at the edges. Justin Peroff’s drums sit back in the mix just enough to feel like something heard through a screen door.
The Three Songs
“Texico Bitches” opens the thing with seven and a half minutes of slow-building euphoria that earns the word without embarrassing itself. It is one of the better songs this band has ever made, and I’ll hold that position.
“Chase Scene” shifts the weight — shorter, darker, more cinematic in a late-Godard-film-with-a-headache kind of way. Millan’s vocal sits closer to the surface here, almost conversational, which makes the instrumental outro feel like being left alone in a room.
Then “Vanity Pail Kids,” the closer, does the thing BSS always threatened to do on their softer records: it floats, and it means it. No irony. No post-rock muscle flex at the end. Just a long, honest exhale.
The EP format suits them better than most bands because their natural unit of composition was never the album side anyway — it was the moment. The moment when the trumpet player two steps off to your left in the room suddenly becomes the center of everything. The moment a vocal melody you didn’t know was coming lifts something open.
Swimming Pool Suite is three of those moments in a row, sequenced like an early evening that you don’t want to end but know will.
Put it on after the dishes are done.