Friday, November 13, 2009

Noughties By Nature #50: Broadcast - Come On Let's Go

Where the machines learned to love. Over their decade-plus existence Broadcast have been guilty on occasion of being a little austere, not remembering to earth themselves as they explored the possibilities of sci-fi electronics in a four minute song. This doesn't automatically make them poor, of course, and there have been just as many moments when they've lightened up and embraced more colloquial pop shapes, but Come On Let's Go is above all of these the moment where everything coalesced, where their humming, droning antique synths found a match between emotional pop pull and the psychedelic sonic experience.

It's a record only an English band could make, as much as Broadcast owe a debt to the US psych underground (and indeed The United States of America). There's something pastoral about the melodic sense in these modulations, full of airy space and dreamlike qualities. Someone we know recently called Trish Keenan's vocals sexy. Don't know if you'd conventionally go that far but they're certainly attractively, unaffectedly honeyed and warm, the better here as she chides her subject for looking elsewhere for love when she's been here all along ("What's the point in wasting time on people that you'll never know... When everybody's disappeared you won't be alone") But for the space age spy theme backing it could almost be 60s beat boom girl pop. As it is, it's music to drift off into the embrace and the ether with.
Simon STN

[YouTube]
[Album: The Noise Made By People]

No comments: