Mystical solace: Broadcast’s Spell Blanket reviewed
Broadcast were one of the last great musical mysteries, a band that came to light before social media hit, from unfashionable Birmingham, whose every record was unpredictably brilliant, allowing listeners to project any and all kind of our own fantasies ono them.
I don’t think Broadcast were trying to be mysterious. Instead, a certain reticence and sense of mystery was hardwired into their music. As a fan you never knew where Broadcast were going to go. Who would have guessed that their first album, the cinematic but fairly conventional 60s pop of The Noise Made By People, would lead to the psychedelic jewellery box explosion of their second, Haha Sound? Or that they would then abandon this for crude but brilliant drum machine and synth abrasiveness on their third, Tender Buttons.
All of which is to say that Spell Blanket — Collected Demos 2006–2009, a collection of four track and mini disc recordings made by Broadcast singer Trish Keenan before her death in 2011, doesn’t ultimately give much insight into what the band’s fifth album, following the Berberian Sound Studio soundtrack, would have sounded like. That fifth album could have slipped out exactly as the 36 demos here sound; or it could have sounded nothing like them and either path would have been in keeping with the Broadcast modus operandi. We simply don’t know. And I suspect the band didn’t either, the shape of that fifth album still beyond even its eventual creators until they actually made it.
You can try to do detective work on Spell Blanket, although the album resists it. The overall sound is minimal, typically just Keenan accompanied by acoustic guitar and / or keyboard pulses, while the recording quality can be quite scratchy. But there are songs that glide like The Noise Made By People (Puzzle), glint like Haha Sound (the driving and very Velvet Underground Hairpin Memories or the fuzzy and dark drum-led Hip Bone To Hip Bone), stride like Tender Buttons (the scrabbling drum machine sketch of Dream Power or the abrasive electronics of Crone Motion) and drift like the ghostly folk of Mother Is The Milky Way (Colour In The Numbers).
(Obsessive Broadcast fans — because what other type are there? — will already be familiar with three Spell Blanket songs — The Song before The Sun Comes Out, Petal Alphabet and Where Are You — which Broadcast co-founder James Cargill posted to Soundcloud to celebrate Trish’s birthday.)
Most intriguingly, a number of Spell Blanket songs sound little like anything Broadcast have released before. Roses Red, for example, has a sloping, brilliantly off, guitar line and drum thump that sounds like Pavement in their early, arty days; A Little Light has a disturbingly chirpy keyboard riff behind it, whose borderline silly, cartoon joie de vivre shouldn’t fit but somehow does; and Greater Than Joy is a thick acapella number, Keenan’s peerless voice layered over itself in great washes of emotion.
You can also speculate as to how it might all have fit together. Of the 36 tracks on Spell Blanket, a handful are little more than brief musical sketches, like the 33-second, nautical synth skit My Marble Eye. Would this song have evolved into something on its own? Would it have been stitched to another of the songs here? Or would it have been cast aside?
Such speculation is inevitable. But it also risks underselling the joys of this album in itself, which contains a number of songs so utterly perfect in demo form I find it hard to believe that Broadcast could ever have improved on them, like Follow The Light, the kind of hypnotically alluring song I can easily imagine tempting me to throw myself off a cliff, or the haunting I Want To Be Fine. As I say, it’s hard to believe these could have become better or been improved in any way. And yet, I CAN believe because Broadcast were an incredibly special band, a collective of like-minded adventurers at whose heart lay the endless imagination of James Cargill and the raw humanity of Trish Keenan.
Spell Blanket isn’t quite the final word on Broadcast. In September Warp is releasing Distant Call — Collected Demos 2000–2006, which rounds up early demos that were later worked into finished productions, as well as two songs that Cargill only discovered after Keenan’s death. After that, Broadcast will be gone forever, the vault closed and our hearts left a-spin.
Even without hearing Distant Call, Spell Blanket feels like the more substantial work. Weighing in at 36 songs and 65 minutes it’s the longest Broadcast album to date (minus compilations), a significant cultural moment that will take a while to fully reveal its lingering charms.
Spell Blanket is a binding tribute to a band who constantly asked questions, whose work never finished and whose influence will never die; rough around the edges but smooth as as black cat’s tail. Spell Blanket is perfectly imperfect, not so much a full stop on Broadcast’s career as a question mark of perpetual intrigue.
NB this was first published on my Substack. If you like it why not sign up, for free? https://linenoise.substack.com/
