The title of "If The News Makes You Sad, Don't Watch It" is not played for laughs. Nothing on this record is. But there's a line where Broken Records soapboxer Jamie Sutherland bellows, "from the couch here, I plead apathy." Unless he's being non-autobiographical, the only natural response upon hearing the rest of Until the Earth Begins to Part is to call bullshit. This album is meant to inspire a sort of lurking dread that you're not doing enough things with your life, and as such, "apathetic" ranks as one of the least-accurate words to describe it. Like a high-school junior volunteering his Saturday at a rescue home, it's concerned, intense, and very much motivated. And like that same person, whatever altruistic intent they have is overshadowed by being so goddamn serious, they're impossible to bear for more than a half hour.
I hesitate to bring up that an influential UK publication called them "the Scottish Arcade Fire" because on the surface, that's the sort of simplistic catch-all comparison that a band spends the rest of their career unfairly trying to live down. But it's helpful in terms of figuring out where everything went wrong-- rather than Funeral catharsis, Sutherland abides by Neon Bible tendency to blunt and oversensationalize. With that, I suppose there's no other choice for this sort of cheap-seats bound stuff than to deal with governmental distrust, post-apocalyptic prophesying, and childlike wonder at the inner workings of one's body: you'll find it completely against type to even acknowledge such a mundane household fixture as a couch. Instead, much of Until the Earth comes off like the narrator from "Windowsill" still telling these damn kids to get off his lawn.
Broken Records certainly believe in the redemptive power of a bunch of people playing instruments at the same time, particularly if they're chamber pieces like glockenspiel, balalaika, mandolin, and horns. If they can all come in after two or more minutes of piano piddling that comes off like narcoleptic Blue Nile ("Wolves", "Nearly Home"), even better. But we really shouldn't go any further without addressing this record's-- and until further notice, this band's-- biggest problem, namely, Sutherland going full-on diva like life is a big commercial. Typically, "bad" vocalists are known as such if they're on the bland side or can't hit notes, but what about giving no quarter whatsoever to what the other guys in the band are doing? I guess it's probably not in Sutherland's best interests to let the lyrics speak for themselves, but he never exhibits awareness of his surroundings, toggling between overbearing brogue and overbearing falsetto to the point where Jeff Buckley sounds like Guru by comparison.
Where Broken Records' "twist" comes in is their adherence to folk stylings, "folk" usually meaning a double-time drum beat and some tiny stringed instrument playing the front. Sure, even if a Coldplay/Gogol Bordello hybrid would possibly slay Coachella, I'm not sure if there's really much breathing room in that Venn diagram. The track that attempts to set up shop in that region ("A Good Reason") sounds suspiciously similar to "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" without the kickass solos, and I seriously doubt they were looking to go there.
Still, it's almost admirable just how easy of a target Broken Records make themselves again and again here-- go ahead, Google the name "Eilert Løvborg." He's the inspiration for the track "If Eilert Løvborg Wrote a Song, It Would Sound Like This", and it'll certainly play well with undergrads who are into songs for the mere fact that they're written from the perspective of Ibsen characters who romantically can't moderate their behavior. It turns out to be pretty embarrassing straight-from-Cliff's Notes fan-fic, and an unbelievably obvious unintentional metaphor for a record. Yet, it seems sorta disingenuous to criticize Until The Earth as being overblown, since there's no way that wasn't Broken Records' intent. Hell, I suppose I should congratulate them for accomplishing their goals of either turning mid-00s collective soul-indie into a spectacle worthy of the "Hate Me Now" video or at least making Glasvegas sound like a bunch of underfunded chumps. Still, if the music can be moving on its own merits, there's no need to be this damn pushy.
