Broken Social Scene - Remember the Humans - VINYL LP

The best of pianist Horace Tapscott's recordings for the tiny Nimbus tag is this 1981 LP which features him in a sextet with trumpeter Reggie Bullen, altoist Gary Bias, tenor saxophonist Sabir Matteen, bassist Roberto Miranda and drummer Everett Brown, Jr. The group stretches out on a couple of Tapscott's originals plus a 19-and-a-half-minute version of Linda Hill's InchDem Folks.Inch

During the Summer of 2021, we received an email from Omer Govreen, a twenty-something Israeli bassist living in Amsterdam. He sent a quartet recording of original songs he made with his friends at the all analog studio Lullabye Factory in Amsterdam. We were floored. We bought the tapes and made an agreement to the album. Featuring Slovenian prodigy Aleksander Sever on vibraphone and Dutch players Wouter Kühne on drums and Floris Kappeyne on piano, this is elegant but still propulsive and melodic music of the highest order. With a cover photo of Iceland (half Europe, half North America, get it?) by Hedi Mandel.

Remember The Humans is their first new studio album in almost a decade and reunites the Toronto collective with producer David Newfeld, who was already responsible for their breakthrough InchYou Forgot It in PeopleInch (2002) and the self-titled album from 2005. The arrangements on the 12 tracks are dense and enveloping - a mesh of horns, guitars, voices and electronics - but the melody always remains confident and does not allow itself to be swallowed up by the sheer sound. When the music drifts towards abstraction, a grounding bass line comes in to anchor the listener, always reminding us that human hands are at the controls and that, artful as it may be, this is still rock'n'roll. As always, Broken Social Scene operates less as a band than a community, and the songs evolve by ceding control to whoever can best drive them forward at the time. Drew may be the designated driver, but the contributors on Remember the Humans, including Hannah Georgas, Lisa Lobsinger and Feist, come to the fore again and again over the course of the album, shaping the songs with a sense of collective authorship that has always defined the group's ethos. In a culture characterized by abstraction and distance, Broken Social Scene have created an album that insists on the analog fact of human presence. It gently but insistently asks us to remember each other, to remember the human. Broken Social Scene have announced the of their new album InchRemember the HumansInch via City Slang / Arts & Crafts. With contributions from Feist, Lisa Lobsinger, Hannah Georgas and others.