This past Tuesday, the last thing any Brandeis student wanted to do was spend more time outside in the hot sun. However, this reporter lined up at 1 p.m. outside TT the Bear's in Cambridge, along with a few other dedicated students and a couple hundred area music fans for wristbands to see Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene. The show, part of the MySpace Secret Shows series, was announced last weekend, and , as per MySpace tradition, tickets were not offered until the day of the show.Relief came around 1:30, when Kevin Drew himself came outside to shake hands with the aspiring concergoers. The evening featured Drew, the lead singer and primary songwriter of Broken Social Scene, and a few of his quondam bandmates. Indie balladeer Ryan Walsh, frontman of Boston band Hallelujah the Hills, was the opener.

Walsh's band, though still local, has recently received some national recognition. The band's latest album, Collective Psychosis Begone, came out in June and has received fairly good reviews, including a 7.0 from Pitchforkmedia.com. The band also recently won a songwriting contest held by the novelist Jonathan Lethem, who challenged bands to write songs using lyrics he'd written for his recent novel, You Don't Love Me Yet.

Walsh performed a solo set with an acoustic guitar, an indie tradition popularized by such solo artists as Ben Kweller and John Vanderslice. Without the full band, Walsh's stripped-down songs showcased their strong melodies and avoided some of the long instrumental passages on the album. His set included a cover of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," a song that's always entertaining. However, Walsh was heckled by one concert-goer who felt the performance was too much like an imitation of Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard's oft-traded cover of the same song.

Kevin Drew took the stage in high spirits, announcing that he and the band hadn't played together for nearly a year. At this particular show, the band consisted of three regular Broken Social Scenesters, as well as members of indie rock bands American Analog Set, Hawaii and Bodega. Between friendly, sometimes unintelligible bouts of stage banter (about such topics as the self-film The Secret and R. Kelly), Drew and the band played the songs from his upcoming solo album, Spirit If., as well as a few songs from the Broken Social Scene canon.The live incarnations of the songs, the studio versions of which have not yet been legally released, featured much of the instrumental jamming for which Broken Social Scene is known. The multi-instrumentalists gave a strong performance, as did Drew himself; I particularly enjoyed a harpsichord-sounding synthesizer figure in Drew's song "Tbtf." However, the new album didn't provide such compelling material for the road-tested group of musicians. The songs, though superbly executed, sometimes seemed to last forever. Perhaps this is simply a criticism of the Broken Social Scene style: a tendency toward superfluous, crescendo-heavy instrumental segments inside what would otherwise be succinct pop gems.

This reporter may have glazed over 45 minutes into Drew's set, but the adoring crowd stuck with Drew as the show went on. This may be a function of the type of concertgoer ready to wait for an hour in the hot Cambridge sun to gain entrance to that evening's show. Regardless, Drew and the band's enthusiasm and technical skill are a testament to their consummate, if sometimes leggy, oeuvre.