BROADCAST: THE NOISE MADE BY PEOPLE (2000)
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.
«Barrel-organ-pop» is not an actual term, but
the more we see that old-time dream-pop fused with electronics, the more pressing
the need for such a term becomes. Stereolab may be named as their immediate
predecessors and mentors, and Beach House and many other bands may be striving
for similar emotional effects, but, really, there are few bands around that
deserve to illustrate that category better than Birmingham's Broadcast, who
spent the first five years of their lives devising and honing that sound, and
then rolled out this debut album which, arguably, they never surpassed — not
in terms of psychological impact, at least.
The
Noise Made By People is a good
title, but a bit self-deprecating: while a certain amount of «ornamental noise»
is indeed present throughout, all the compositions respect melody and are
completely «accessible», provided you are not in the specific mood for a dance
album or something (or, at least, not a fast, energetic dance album — slow,
cool-tempered waltzing would be quite appropriate for much of this stuff). The
«noise» itself usually comes in the form of various kaleidoscopic effects which
rarely detract from the repetitive, but entrancing melodies — on the contrary,
considering how Christmas-y the general atmosphere is, they just add tinsel
flavor.
Most of the ingredients of the music are
recognizable, but the overall synthesis is quite idiosyncratic. The idea of
creating lightly psychedelic pop with (slightly antiquated) electronics may
have been borrowed from The United States of America, as is sometimes noted,
and then there are further analogies with just about every technology-obsessed
dream-pop band from the Cocteau Twins to Stereolab. On the other hand, lead
singer Trish Keenan belongs to the cohort of chilly-voiced femmes mysterieuses, half-Snow Queen, half-Snow White, as
Renaissance's Annie Haslam (to whom she bears a particularly striking
resemblance every time she reaches for those high notes) or even Karen
Carpenter (she doesn't have Karen's lower range, so the vocals sound more
generally «air-conditioned», but she has the same introspective / melancholy ring)
— and she also seems to have a serious taste for Sixties' vocal jazz fairies
like Astrud Gilberto, going for that «deeply human, but utterly impenetrable»
aura that used to mesmerize people back when it was so trendy to want to be
mesmerized by the little strange wonders of the world.
You put it all together — the simple,
repetitive melodies, usually formed by drums-and-bass patterns with prolonged,
trance-oriented keyboard notes laid on top; the additional electronic and,
sometimes, electric guitar effects; and those gorgeously cold «don't touch me,
I'm spell-generating here!» vocals — and you get yourself one of the finest
atmospheric landscapes of the 2000s. In particular, it is a near-perfect
experience for lonely wintery evenings, what with its bringing out all the
potential beauty of «cold» and «dark» without slipping into banalities and
trivialities and without
concentrating on the negative sides of it all. You hate the cold season? Let
Broadcast warm it up for you. Never mind that the album was released at the
end of March — it's a Decemberist record if there ever was one.
If there is a problem, it's that everything basically sounds the same. ʽLong Was The
Yearʼ opens the album on a «sterner» mood, with some stiff, quasi-Teutonic
rhythmics and a darker, heavier vocal color from Trish. ʽUnchanging Windowʼ
follows it up with a slightly more upbeat tempo, chirpier vocals and a more
playful attitude (all strictly within the limits of good old British decency,
mind you). Once you are acquainted with these two sub-paradigms, everything
else is mostly just further variations on them — including several completely
instrumental tunes (the little «toy snowstorm» of ʽMinus Oneʼ is playful, while
ʽTower Of Our Tuningʼ and ʽDead The Long Yearʼ are decidedly darker in spirit,
though still nowhere near «dangerously dark»).
This, as well as the overtly «static» nature of
most of the songs, which almost always end exactly the same way as they began, is
an obviously self-imposed limitation — it carves out a stylistic niche for the
band, but it also traps them in that niche (a feeling not wholly unfamiliar to
connaisseurs of the indie market), and a side effect of that trapping is that
I cannot discuss the individual songs, unless I really want to get into the peculiarities of all the chimes, bells,
and whistles activated in the recording process, or overanalyze the
«moods-within-the-moods» reflected in Keenan's singing here and there. All I
can say is that the melodies are
different, and that there is plenty of tiny little nuances that come and go.
Well, maybe some of the tunes are a bit jazzier than others — ʽCome On Let's
Goʼ, or the waltzing ʽPapercutsʼ, for instance, both of which show that the generally
immobile «friendly Snow Queen» can condescend to wiggling it up a bit, just to
prove that she does consist of organic compounds. And then again, some are a
bit more frozen than others — ʽUntil Thenʼ, for instance, where all the
electronics sounds as if they were freshly blown out of a stalagmite or
something.
On the positive side, the evenness of the
material means that all the songs are
about equally good, no particular low- or highlights — although some of the
instrumentals are guilty of
patience-trying, but even here it is understandable: «static musical
landscapes» are supposed to be like that (for instance, the «who's gonna go and
finally close that squeaky door?» bit at the end of ʽDead The Long Yearʼ). The
ambitions of The Noise Made By People
are lightweight and limited, but within those limits, they are perfectly
adequate, and that guarantees a convinced thumbs up — for an album that is not so much
«awesome» as it is «touchingly charming», and you know there are actually certain times in life when «touchingly
charming» is needed more than «awesome».
Check "The Noise Made By People" (MP3) on Amazon
"lonely wintery evenings"
ReplyDeleteI live in the tropical country of Suriname ...
You might want to check out "Work and Non Work" a "mini-album" from 1997 that collects some early singles and an ep. Just songs, no instrumentals, you should like it.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.allmusic.com/album/work-and-non-work-mw0000028624
I second that, Work and Non Work should be reviewed, especially since they were not a prolific band if you just go by proper album releases. However, there actually is an instrumental on the album - Phantom - but it is short and catchy.
DeleteBesides being an enjoyable listen, I think it says quite a bit about the band with regards to their refusal to release a proper album until they had perfected their approach.
Awesome album + great review.
ReplyDelete