Broken Social Scene, an outsized all-star group featuring many major players of the early-2000s Toronto music scene, broke through with its 2003 album “You Forgot It In People,” featuring songs that emphasized community, and felt joyful, enormous and cathartic at once – and paving a runway from which their countrymen Arcade Fire soon took off. It remains an unusual album to feel like a classic. Unlike some “supergroups,” which hone individual gifts into a clean, singular vision, Broken Social Scene embraced the messy sprawl that comes from piling ideas on top of ideas. The group deliberately put too many chefs in the kitchen, and then turned that from a liability into an asset.

The group emphasized its power in numbers before it even took the stage Thursday at the State Theatre in Portland: The sheer number of microphones that lined the front of the stage may have been the most of any act to play the venue, with the possible exception of Wu-Tang Clan. In all, nine members of Broken Social Scene shared the stage, swapping duties – with the multi-instrumentalist Kevin Drew serving loosely as the frontman – and playing a set stuffed with jubilant anthems. By the end of the show, everything that wasn’t nailed down was raised in triumph, be it guitars, trumpets, microphones or fists.

The set was divided between numbers from “You Forgot It In People” and this year’s “Hug of Thunder,” yet it was often the songs from their middle albums – particularly 2010’s underrated, masterful “Forgiveness Rock Record” – that shined the brightest. That album’s “World Sick” proved to be the biggest-sounding song, peppered with psychedelic colors in concert, while other numbers suggested that this is Drew’s favorite album. He hopped into the crowd to run through the lively “Texico Bitches” and showed off some resounding, soulful lead vocals on the ballad “The Sweetest Kill.”

The newer material added different dimensions to the set, whether it was the politically charged “Protest Song” or the country-like strumming of “Skyline.” On the record, some of these songs feel burdened by the weight of the entire album; in concert, they broke like clouds. Indeed, Broken Social Scene proves to be a superb live band, if one that doesn’t tour quite enough to cultivate a live audience (and playing in Maine on the same night the New England Patriots play never helps). The people in attendance were highly enthusiastic, but the band gave the impression that it would have played with the same energy in front of five people or 5,000.

The full arsenal of its live show also accentuated how oddly shaped some of its compositions are, often seeming to slide sideways into their choruses, like a school bus on an icy road. Even the most-loved “You Forgot It In People” song of the evening, the near-set-closing “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl,” is less a song than a feeling; in the context of 2017, it was a heaving, nostalgic sigh for the early aughts. The song’s two or three nearly incomprehensible melodies were repeated over a brass crescendo, before giving way to the instrumental “Meet Me in the Basement.” The third victory lap of the evening sent audiences out into the night, having experienced a concert that was less a peck on the cheek than a big, sloppy kiss.

Robert Ker is a freelance writer who lives in Portland.

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