Broadcast - Albums Collection 1997-2009 (6CD)

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Broadcast - Albums Collection 1997-2009 (6CD)

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Space age pop collagists Broadcast formed in Birmingham, England, in 1995; comprised of vocalist Trish Keenan, guitarist Tim Felton, bassist James Cargill, keyboardist Roj Stevens, and drummer Steve Perkins, the quintet came together out of a shared affection for the psychedelic cult band the United States of America, a primary influence on their subsequent work as a group. Debuting in 1996 with the Wurlitzer Jukebox label single "Accidentals," Broadcast immediately won favorable comparisons to Stereolab for their sample-heavy, analog, synth-driven sound; the comparisons continued when they signed to Stereolab's Duophonic Super 45s imprint for their next effort, "Living Room." After the icily atmospheric Book Lovers EP, the group moved to Warp Records to release 1997's Work and Non-Work, a compilation of their existing singles tracks. The much-anticipated full-length The Noise Made by People finally appeared in early 2000 and the Extended Play Two EP was issued that fall.

Ever the studio perfectionists, Broadcast made fans wait until 2003 to hear any new material from the band, when the Pendulum EP arrived that spring and Haha Sound appeared that summer. In fall 2005, Broadcast – pared down to the duo of Keenan and Cargill – issued the America's Boy single and Tender Buttons full-length. Released in 2006, Future Crayon collected the group's numerous rare tracks and B-sides. The band resurfaced in fall 2009 with Broadcast & the Focus Group Investigate the Witch Cults of the Radio Age, a collaboration with the Focus Group's Julian House that took their sound in a spookier direction more overtly influenced by their interest in library music. In support of the album, Broadcast toured with Atlas Sound and issued a tour-only EP, Mother Is the Milky Way. Keenan passed away on January 14, 2011, due to complications from pneumonia. Two years later, the score to director Peter Strickland's '70s giallo cinema homage Berberian Sound Studio – which Broadcast began working on before Keenan's passing and featured some of her final vocals – arrived.

Jason Ankeny, Allmusic.com

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Broadcast - Albums Collection 1997-2009 (6CD)

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Broadcast - Albums Collection 1997-2009 (6CD)

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Warp's first rock/pop signing since Pulp (yup, Pulp) were Stereolab-soundalikes Broadcast, whose early singles for Wurlitzer Jukebox and the 'Lab's own Duophonic label attracted much attention for the their sing-songy fusions of Tortoise-y groovebox meandering and clean-room electronica. Work and Non Work, the group's Warp debut, is really nothing more than a compilation of those singles ("Accidentals," "Living Room," and The Book Lovers EP, to be exact). As a mini-LP for the new initiate, it serves as a handy one-stop updater, but since most of it appeared elsewhere within the previous six months and not a single second of previously unavailable material is included, it's not worth much to fans of any duration.

Review by Sean Cooper, Allmusic.com

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Broadcast - Albums Collection 1997-2009 (6CD)

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After being mired in the studio for nearly three years, Broadcast returned with their first proper full-length album, The Noise Made by People, a collection of more shimmering, weightless pop that is nostalgic for yesterday's visions of the future but remains on the cutting edge of contemporary music. Where their early singles (collected on 1997's Work and Non-Work) painted small, quaint portraits of their retro-futurism, The Noise Made by People delivers their sound in widescreen, filmic grandeur. Richly layered yet airy pieces like the album bookends, "Long Was the Year" and "Dead the Long Year," seamlessly blend symphonic, electronic, and pop elements into smoky, evocative epics, while synth-based interludes such as "Minus One" and "The Tower of Our Tuning" present Broadcast's more detached, scientific side. Likewise, Trish Keenan's air-conditioned vocals sometime suggest a robotized Sandie Shaw or Cilla Black, but her humanity peeks out on "Come on Let's Go" and "Papercuts." "Echo's Answer" and "Until Then" are two of the other highlights from the album, which despite all of its chilly unearthliness, is a noise made by (very talented) people.

Review by Heather Phares, Allmusic.com

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Broadcast - Albums Collection 1997-2009 (6CD)

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On their early singles and brilliant debut album, The Noise Made by People, Broadcast's commitment to crafting meticulously, ethereally beautiful atmospheres gave their music a detached quality that made them somewhat difficult to embrace fully. This isn't the case on Haha Sound, the band's second album. While their music still sounds like it could've been crafted by ghosts in the machine, now Broadcast give it flesh and blood through more warmth and texture. As with the Pendulum EP, Haha Sound's more human touch comes through in its looser, more intimate, and rougher sound. But aside from being warmer and more textured, the album is simply more, as its first three songs reveal. The delicately spooky nursery rhyme "Colour Me In" begins the album with the wistful, childlike viewpoint that creeps into Haha Sound from time to time, its layers of chopped up, sawing strings giving it an oddly and sweetly tentative feel. "Pendulum" finds the band digging deeper into their psychedelic influences, with acid rock drumming and flashback-like washes of sound making it one of the most tense, driving tracks they've recorded. The Pendulum EP suggested that the entire album might be as wired and dissonant as this song, but tracks like "Before We Begin" quickly prove otherwise. A superstitious song about reuniting lovers, it's gorgeous pop in the vein of "The Book Lovers" and "Come On Let's Go," but more approachable and that much more alluring because of it. The rest of Haha Sound more or less follows in the footsteps of these songs, but the variety that the band instills in the album makes it far from monotonous. A big part of Haha Sound's expansive feel is Trish Keenan's increasingly expressive vocals; while she can still occasionally seem to be hovering slightly outside the songs, her delivery is much more vulnerable and emotive. She's soothing on "Valerie," which is Broadcast's idea of a folk song or lullaby – although with all of its eerie background noises, sleeping with one eye open is suggested – ecstatic on "Minim," and poignant on "The Little Bell," another sweetly childlike song that sounds like Keenan is singing inside a broken clock. Noisier aspects find their way into interludes like "Distortion" and "Black Umbrellas," a curious, fuzzy oompah that picks up speed like an out-of-control assembly line. "Man Is Not a Bird" concludes with a playful, Raymond Scott-esque percussive exercise. The spirits of Scott and Joe Meek haunt the album's carefully deconstructed sound, most obviously on its more extreme tracks, but even on gentler songs like the flight of fancy "Lunch Hour Pops," which has a giddy, space-age sweetness akin to the Tornadoes' "Telstar." This song, the beautiful "Ominous Cloud," and "Winter Now" suggest that Broadcast could probably make dozens of immaculate pop songs like these if they wanted to, but all the detours the band takes are precisely what make the more perfectly crafted songs so precious. Haha Sound may not be Broadcast's most superficially perfect album, but it's a more challenging and exciting one because of its deliberate imperfections.

Review by Heather Phares, Allmusic.com

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Broadcast - Albums Collection 1997-2009 (6CD)

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Reflecting their newly streamlined status as a duo, Broadcast's Tender Buttons strips their luminous electronic pop down to its barest essence. Initially, the album is a shock, and not always a pleasant one; many Broadcast fans have come to expect each release as a chance to be blown away by the group's ever-bigger and better sounds, and from their early EPs to the ornate Haha Sound, Broadcast seemed to challenge themselves by adding more layers and twists and turns to their music. Here, Trish Keenan and James Cargill push themselves to do more with much less. The pruning ends up being prudent; concentrating on just a few musical motifs, Tender Buttons has a uniquely fresh, modern feel. Sparingly applied beats, intricate but subtle guitars, and hazy synths dominate the album, providing a restrained backdrop for Keenan's quietly commanding voice and crossword-puzzle lyrics. As if to underscore Broadcast's new aesthetic, Tender Buttons opens with some of its most radical departures: "I Found the F"'s largely spoken vocals and driving bassline, "Black Cat"'s austere pulse, and the title track's whispery, sinister sensuality all stretch (or rather, shrink) the boundaries of what a Broadcast song can be. At first, these tracks just sound unfinished, but the beauty of their bareness reveals itself eventually. Not all of Tender Buttons is this naked. The single "America's Boy" (which somehow manages to play into and dismiss the mythic American soldier at the same time) and "Arc of a Journey"'s stargazing are a little more fleshed out, nodding to the full, swirling sound of Broadcast's earlier work without rehashing it. Likewise, "Michael a Grammar" and "Goodbye Girls" offer a more colorful, charming spin on the band's new approach. Still, Tender Buttons' most restrained moments are often most striking: "You and Me in Time" plays like a delicately surreal update of Julee Cruise's spacy torch-pop, while the absolutely stunning vignette "Tears in the Typing Pool" makes the most of an acoustic guitar and Keenan's gorgeous vocals and evocative songwriting skills. Oddly enough, Tender Buttons' simplicity makes it more demanding than Broadcast's other work; it requires more than just a few listens to sink in. However, the tension between Broadcast's catchy and aloof, experimental sides is what makes their music intriguing, and Tender Buttons is no different in that regard: even when it seems to be stripped bare, it's still full of mystery.

Review by Heather Phares, Allmusic.com

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Broadcast - Albums Collection 1997-2009 (6CD)

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Collecting most of Broadcast's EP tracks, B-sides, and rarities from The Noise Made by People and Haha Sound eras, Future Crayon is a welcome reminder of how consistently interesting the band's output is. Indeed, the band's other EP collection, Work and Non-Work, flowed just as well, if not better, than many other groups' full-length albums. Future Crayon isn't quite that cohesive, but it does chart how Broadcast's sound developed during that time, and also includes some tracks that even die-hard fans might have missed the first time around. The collection begins with a string of relatively poppy songs that rival the quality of anything that appeared on either The Noise Made by People or Haha Sound. Extended Play Two's "Illumination" is particularly gorgeous, opening with an insistent bassline and Trish Keenan's coolly lovely voice before achieving lift-off with clouds of backing vocals and art-damaged synths. Meanwhile, "Still Feels Like Tears" from the Pendulum EP takes the title track's stripped-down psych-rock in a lighter, sweeter direction, while Extended Play's "Where Youth and Laughter Go" begins as a clockwork lullaby and then swells into quintessentially Broadcast-like sci-fi lounge-pop. Future Crayon then delves into the more experimental side of the band's music, which usually only appears as brief interludes on their albums. 1998's "Hammer Without a Master," which originally appeared on the Warp comp We Are Reasonable People and is one of this collection's rarest tracks, is an especially striking collage of horror-show organs and death-surf guitars grounded by jazzy drumming; along with "Daves Dream," it sounds like a more elegant version of the sound Add N to (X) was pursuing at the time. The aptly-named "Chord Simple" is a lovely, oddly affecting instrumental that appears twice here, both on its own and as a part of a harder-edged version of "Unchanging Window." While the decision to put most of the more accessible tracks on the first half of the disc is understandable, it doesn't always make for the easiest listening – sometimes, it feels easy to get lost in the more abstract moments later on in the collection. Nevertheless, Future Crayon is a must for Broadcast obsessives and a good way for casual fans to explore some of the rougher edges of their music.

Review by Heather Phares, Allmusic.com

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Broadcast - Albums Collection 1997-2009 (6CD)

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Broadcast's music has always been a little unearthly, so Broadcast & the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age isn't so much a departure as it is an inspired homage to their influences. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and its alternately innocent and menacing soundtrack inspired the band years before the movie was rediscovered. The whimsy and strangely familiar feel of '60s and '70s library music could also be heard in their music from the beginning, but never more clearly than on this mini-album. Broadcast's more esoteric side is heightened by the Focus Group, whose Ghost Box label is ground zero for the evocatively named hauntology micro-genre, which digs deep into vintage electronics and notions of what people thought the future would be like – two things Broadcast have always done, even if they're not explicitly part of the hauntology crowd. …Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age's highly detailed, evocative miniatures replace Tender Buttons' stark clarity with softly busy collages full of literal and figurative layers. Analog synths, distant beats, guitar arpeggios, and clouds of Trish Keenan's vocals flit in and out of snippets like "Will You Read Me" in a gently disorienting and deeply trippy fashion. Yet the feel goes beyond being merely druggy, although the funky "How Do You Get Along Sir?" and self-explanatory "Drug Party" certainly imply chemical enhancement. Most tracks radiate a spectral purity, or suggest something as hallucinatory as ghosts taking drugs. "We Are After All Here," which superimposes Keenan's voice with backwards vocals, shimmering electronics, and crowd noises, sounds like two worlds layered over each other – and it's impossible to tell who's on which side of the divide. But while …Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age has a few spooky moments, most notably "Libra, the Mirror's Minor Self," it's more charmingly odd than unnerving, with the dusty warmth of mellowing in an attic somewhere. "The Be Colony" echoes Haha Sound's cheerfully aloof psychedelic pop, with Keenan sounding as blankly sweet as a children's show host as she sings "all circles vanish"; "I See, So I See So" invokes winter with brittle chamber music; and the half-dirge, half-lullaby "Make My Sleep His Song" may be the album's most beautiful melody. Despite the meticulous layering and arrangements in songs like these and "Ritual/Looking In" – which sounds like a never-ending sunrise called into being by a magical flute – the album is so open-ended that it often sounds like field music. It's not surprising that Broadcast would imbue so much creativity into what other acts would consider a stopgap release, but …Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age is still unique in their body of work. Not so much a soundtrack to a film that was never made as it is music that demands images to accompany it, this is a welcome return after the four years of silence that followed Tender Buttons.

Review by Heather Phares, Allmusic.com