“How many football fans do we have here tonight?”
Ah, there’s nothing quite like an indie-rock show to give jaded misfit hipsters a safe haven from the cruel world of intercollegiate athletics and the unbelievable swarms of drunken, red-faced synchophants that can descend on a pigskin-obsessed college town like Athens, GA.
Judging from the chorus of boos that Broken Social Scene frontman Kevin Drew elicited with this question, it’s safe to assume that the Venn diagram of INDIE ROCK FAN and COLLEGE FOOTBALL FAN continues to have precious little overlap. To further encourage cultural ghettoization, tonight’s triple bill of BSS, Metric, and Jason Collett started at 8:30, barely an hour after the UGA-Alabama clash had concluded, and not nearly enough time for post-game stragglers to do a few requisite Jaeger bombs and then stumble unwittingly into the middle of the post-rock festivities.
Those acolytes of the red and black who ended up pressing the flesh at overcrowded downtown bars missed a sparsely attended evening of dead-sexy dance-punk courtesy of Metric, as well as the all-over-the-map brilliance of 2003’s indie Cinderellas, Broken Social Scene, who sounded equally at ease with the cerebral post-rock of “KC Accidental,” the chill-out ambience of “Looks Just Like the Sun,” and the runaway rollercoaster pop-rock of “Almost Crimes.”
Indisputable highlight: Metric lead singer Emily Haines returns to the stage to reprise her vocal turn on “Anthem for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” the most poignantly unshakeable track on Broken Social Scene’s masterful You Forgot it In People. Now, I’ve never been a seventeen-year old girl, but there’s just something about the juxtaposition between Haines’ bubblegum-simple lyrics (”park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me”) and the slow-swelling maelstrom of post-rock guitars that just devastates me, and it was even better in person, with Haines falling to her knees while delivering that spine-tingling refrain, overcome with the sheer nakedness and endless emotional connotation of those everyday commands and throwaway interjections.
On the way back to the car, we walked past a popular post-game watering hole called Silver Britches, which promptly greeted us with the sweet strains of 80s hair-metal glamourpussies Poison. Which made me realize: maybe things are better off this way after all.