A Canadian indie collective worth emulating.

What is it about elaborate indie-rock collectives these days? Dallas musician Tim DeLaughter recovered from the death of a Tripping Daisy bandmate by forming the 20-plus-member, psychedelic Up With People-like Polyphonic Spree, who repeatedly rouse crowds with cheerful melodies, stunning crescendos and a nonstop barrage of smiles. Omaha's Bright Eyes, aka Conor Oberst, shook off his Midwestern malaise and took more than a dozen pals, including members of Cursive and Azure Ray, on tour and turned indie rock's tired antiglobalization, antiwar tropes into an epic broadside about "cowboy presidents" that was somehow triumphant and brand new. Vancouver supergroup the New Pornographers recently released an album that glistens almost as much as their city's waterfront. It's a record with enough hooks to knock out Roy Jones, Jr.

So maybe the point is that no matter where you're from or what valid reasons you have to wallow, it's hard to be a whiny baby bitch when you have a crew.

"The lone artist has had its day," says Broken Social Scene singer/co-mastermind Kevin Drew. "'Written, produced, arranged by' [one artist] is over. There's been enough of that. The self-exhibitionist has come to an end. People want to see energy on stage? It's almost like, 'Don't watch us, we won't watch you.'"

Not surprisingly, Toronto collective Broken Social Scene, which includes members of numerous experimental acts including Do Make Say Think and Metric, say fuck that noise. Their album You Forgot It in People, just released in the U.S., is a genre-bending work made by musical savants who have decided not to give a fuck anymore and just let their pop tendencies take over.

"It was almost like we wanted to invade the pop world," Drew says.

It's a little like a shimmering amalgamation of, well, the Polyphonic Spree, Bright Eyes and the New Pornographers, but it's also a little like Jesus Jones, Pavement, Secret Machines and, as Drew says, "whoever you like." It's pretty remarkable, how this somewhat rotating lineup of a dozen or so art-rock and noise-band veterans created these shiny, soaring anthems (like the standout "Almost Crimes") that end exactly when they should.

"'Shorten it down' was something I had never heard before," Drew says. "So it was a nice diversity to enter the building."

It's hard to forget everything you've done before and create another path, but it can help to pretend that you're young. On the elegiac, hopeful "Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl," the distorted female vocals start and conclude with:

Used to be one of the rotten ones and he liked you for that. Now you're all gone, got your makeup on, and you ain't coming back.

It's a beginning to wherever you're headed next. It's an end to everywhere you've been. It's your ideal intro to this new band.

Of course, Broken Social Scene actually isn't that new. It all started with Feel Good Lost, an instrumental album Drew and a few friends made in a basement a couple winters ago. When You Forgot It in People dropped in Canada last year, Broken Social Scene were crowned as geniuses. Stores couldn't keep enough copies of the album in stock. The band won prestigious awards.

Over here in America, nobody had any idea. That changed in February, when online review site Pitchfork raved about the band, telling readers they simply had to hear this for themselves. The review prompted me to check out Broken Social Scene at Northsix a few weeks later, and given Pitchfork's influence, it surely resulted in hundreds of Google searches about the band. No matter what anybody says, this one online review started the band's momentum in the U.S.

Problem is, so many music-critic pretenders, who gather in places like the incorrectly named "I Love Music" message board, hate Pitchfork. These writers have wasted thousands of words railing against Pitchfork's fakeness, shallowness, whatever. Of course, these are the same scribes who get aroused the most when the Village Voice publishes their impenetrable prose.

The worst you can say about Pitchfork, which truly cares about discovering new music and is often funny and smart, is that some of their conceits are the stuff of college English classes. But can you think of any time you cared more about music than when you were in college? Indie rock itself is a highly experimental, often embarrassing and amateurish genre, so why hate a site that takes similar chances and scores more often than it misses? Jealousy, of course, because it's hard for some to fathom that some dude with a webzine has as much influence as paper that makes hands dirty.

So there may be a backlash already in store for Broken Social Scene just based on who likes them. Of course, this is all just weak-ass shit compared to what the band has already been through, and if it now achieves some sort of collective unconscious, well, that may be enough.

"The drug days are over," Drew says. "The days of having major-label dreams being crushed are over. We're a pretty civil crew who just enjoy life. And it's not a great time to do that right now. If we can get out there and have people go home and have a nice sleep, that will do."

I wonder why a collective like this has happened in Toronto, but not in New York, which is supposedly in the middle of an important rock moment.

"This city is, like, 42 blocks, Drew says. "It's hard not to know everybody if you're making music. What we have is a huge diversity.

"There's no real category of music. You don't hear songs that say 'New York' in every fucking sentence. I believe 'New York' and 'L.A.' should be struck from lyrics. It's been done too many times."