FILTER REISSUES
Dwellers on the threshold
Two albums (and one mini album) that capture Birmingham’s much-missed magi of occult psych-pop at their experimental and emotional ex tremes. Andrew Male is bewitched.
Broadcast Reissues
WARP. CD/DL/LP
BROADCAST NEVER belonged to the present. From such early recordings as the ghostly waltzing lullaby of 1996’s Accidentals or The Book Lovers’ cimbalom spy-theme drama, it was clear Trish Keenan and James Cargill’s spectral pop sound existed beyond their urban Birmingham origins, somewhere between half-remembered folk and psych pasts and an unrealised incorporeal future. As such, their music – eerie, elegiac, yet imbued with a working-class science-lab optimism – has aged in a very different way from their late- ’90s contemporaries. Broadcast don’t so much define the early noughties as slip free from it, inhabiting instead a tense, unverifiable betweenworld, surreal and mundane, absurd and malign, yet almost always conveyed via the genre structure of ’60s psychedelic pop.
Listening to these three reissues, which take us from their earliest Peel session in 1996 to one of their final recordings before Trish Keenan’s tragic death from pneumonia in 2011, is both an unsettling and strangely joyous experience, both emotions often experienced at the same time. The Maida Vale Sessions ★★★★ brings together four BBC sessions recorded for John Peel between October 1996 and August 2003, and works as an ideal introduction to Broadcast’s dark, transformative power.
BACK STORY: DOWNSIZING
● Although largely remembered as the duo of Cargill and Keenan, Broadcast began as a quintet with guitarist Tim Felton, keyboardist Roj Stevens and drummer Steve Perkins. They were honest about their inspiration, citing Delia Derbyshire and David Vorhaus’s White Noise project and The United States Of America’s self-titled 1968 LP with its fusion of West Coast psychedelia, primitive electronics and the sardonic vocal delivery of frontwoman Dorothy Moskowitz. However, a gradual loss of members meant that the ambition to replicate the scale of their influences was compromised, forcing Keenan and Cargill to find new and fresh ways to create ambitious electronic worlds with just the two of them.
One of the first things that’s striking about these recordings is how raw and clear they seem without the swirls of psychedelic pastiche that occasionally brought an opaque numbness to the group’s first two LPs, 2000’s The Noise Made By People and 2003’s Haha Sound. As such, their power now seems greater, closer to the exposed bare-walls minimalism of their finest album, 2005’s Tender Buttons. The versions of The Noise…’s Look Outside, Come On Let’s Go and Long Was The Year sound free, naked and unburdened, while Keenan’s voice, a hypnotic dream-sleep monotone, beguiles and unnerves. Stripped of its spectral veils, a dark, numinous melancholy overwhelms; a feeling akin to being hypnotised by a somnambulist. If listening to Broadcast was often as much an intellectual exercise as weird pop communion –a ticking off of chic ’60s boho references – here it is much closer to a complete letting go or giving in.