Label: Warp Records
1 Long Was The Year
2 Unchanging Window
3 Minus One
4 Come On Let’s Go
5 Echo’s Answer
6 Tower Of Our Tuning
7 Papercuts
8 You Can Fall
9 Look Outside
10 Until Then
11 City In Progress
12 Dead The Long Year
Broadcast were, perhaps unhelpfully, forever lumped together with Stereolab, a band who shared the merging of influences like French chanson, psychedelia, early electronic music and hauntology, but where Stereolab mostly stuck to that blueprint, Broadcast only got darker and stranger in time, as with their project with The Focus Group. Their stunning debut album on Warp from 2000 was undoubtedly pretty disturbing in places, but lovely too, anchored by the sweet, airily detached voice of the much missed Keenan.
The instrumental ‘Tower of our Tuning’ could be simultaneously from a brand new horror film, or some sixties avant-garde experimental opus, while ‘Unchanging Window’ and ‘You Can Fall’ are almost sinister nursery rhymes. Their calm moments were always as eerie as their louder ones. Intensity doesn’t always scream.
What has mostly endured about the band is how prescient their eerie analogue synth sound really was. They seemed to point ahead to the recent love of retro futurism, as well as the new fondness for folk horror. Musical artists like Haxan Cloak and Gazelle Twin, and film makers like Ben Wheatley and Alice Lowe, undoubtedly owe them a debt of influence, fusing modern techniques with a love of 60s/70s uncanny things.
Settle down on your beige corduroy beanbag, pour a lovely glass of Babycham, and ignore the key party going on next-door. There’s only three TV channels, no social media and ‘Armchair Thriller’ is about to begin. Ulp. Broadcast to my mind were past, present and future, all at once, and the West Midlands has a hell of a lot to answer for.
Hit The North 