Broken Social Scene Share Unreleased Track "Golden Facelift", Fucked Up Share 17-Minute Italian Opera

Broadsheet Music: A Year in Review is a partnership between Arts & Crafts, The Globe & Mail, and the Canadian Opera Company. Artists were asked to contribute music inspired by important news topics of 2014. The project includes an unreleased Broken Social Scene song called “Golden Facelift”, the first bit of new BSS music since 2010. (The news topic? “Reclamation and human accountability.”)

It also includes Fucked Up‘s 17-minute Italian opera “Voce Rubata” (translation: “Stolen Voice”) featuring members of the Canadian Opera Company, inspired by “the misleading illusions of liberty and the voice.” The solo song from Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning, “No Doubt or Fire”, was inspired by the death of Robin Williams. Reuben and the Dark, Tamara Williamson & Absolutely Free, and Jason Collett & Zeus all also contributed tracks. Listen to the whole thing below and download it for free from The Globe & Mail.

“Golden Facelift” is an outtake from the Forgiveness Rock Record sessions. The band shared this statement about the song:

It is a song we as a band all felt strongly about lyrically and musically and we wanted to give it a proper unveiling when the time was right. We feel that chance is now as this year draws to a close. 2014 has not been without its beauty, but it has also been a year of incredible brutality and all of humanity has a great deal to answer for. As songwriters and creative artists we want the world to know Broken Social Scene’s aim is to be a voice that will champion underdogs and the idea of goodness on this planet upon which we all take up valuable space.

Fucked Up’s “Voce Rubata” is an opera in six acts. They explain:

“Voce Rubata” is about two threads of a similar illusion, both leading to their own tragic outcome. A tragedy of hope for a kind of creative mobility, and a tragedy of abandonment in discovering the mechanisms by which one is meant to be ‘free’ in fact are in the service of promising liberty, but not delivering it. All this is told through the prism of the trappings of being a classically trained singer, who can only operate within the bounds of tradition.

Read our recent interviews with Kevin Drew and with Fucked Up. 

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