Some bands get by mostly on style (not songs), and some bands get by mostly on songs (not style). Broadcast are the sort of particularly good band that usually manages to offer both. That's not just to say that their sound is inventive, or their production alluring, or any of that other brainy stuff, true as it may be. It's to say that they sound flat-out convincingly cool, something that's more important that most rock folks like to admit.
Since their terrific first EPs, collected on Work and Non-Work (1997), Broadcast have had more turtlenecked Euro beatnik chic than you'd expect from a band that's actually English: jazz swing, an elegant Françoise Hardy singer, Godard-film sleekness, cosmopolitan intrigue. Their influences were psychedelic without the usual "rock" hanging around after it, and yet they seemed somehow more in line with the kind of leftfield electronic music they never actually made. They produced some kind of special, languid reverb that made it so you could have listened to them fart around on organs for ten minutes and been reasonably happy about it. And yet you never had to, because they wrapped those things around such gorgeous, fully coherent songs-- Bacharachs next to Stereolab's "Louie Louie". All thanks in part, I'm guessing, to the kind of work schedule that made us wait a good three years before they even got around to recording a proper album.
So after the grand changes and breakthroughs of last year's Tender Buttons, they're releasing this package, a set of EP tracks (and two compilation rarities) spanning the gap between that first collection and the present. The 18 tracks here are a battleground of that whole style-versus-songs thing: In between an impressive number of great second-string pop songs, you get a few full-on tastes of what it sounds like when the band really is just paddling around in its own style and atmosphere. Here and there we zone out into the background, into the incidental music for the parts of the imaginary tourfilm where Broadcast are just catching flights and setting up their equipment. And if you're devoted enough to this group's style, incidental music turns out to be likeable enough-- especially when, as on "Minus Two" or "DDL", it sees the group testing out new electronic ideas and production tricks. Elsewhere, it's just sleek instrumental swing, spy-movie soundtracks gone sci-fi, and only very occasionally irritating.
The praiseworthy part, though, comes as you sink into this, find your away around, and finally notice the significant number of pop tracks that could have slipped unobtrusively onto any of the band's LPs-- sometimes as decent additions, sometimes even as stand-outs. (It can take a few listens to slip through the alluring atmospheres and start differentiating.) The band's 60s-psychedelic influences get clearer than usual on "Unchanging Window" (a modern "White Rabbit") and "Poem of a Dead Song" (which cops its structure direct from "Some Velvet Morning"). "Illumination" and "Where Youth and Laughter Go" are the kind of sleepy jazz-combo psychedelics that stocked Work and Non-Work, the latter with a tremolo guitar hook that's the most golden moment on here. Then, like the musique concrete minimalism of "Echo's Answer" (not included), there are tracks like "Small Song IV" and "Distant Call"-- proving again that these folks can wind Trish Keenan's voice through the barest dots of sound and come off better than ever. Which is something they should do more often, and-- these days-- just might be.
Listening through all this is actually a strange experience, even to someone who heard most of these EPs as they first came out. This is a group that's always seemed stylish, even vaguely "experimental"-- and yet they've released albums and compilations (Work and Non-Work chief among them!) that felt far more focused and consistent than that. Here's the first full-length Broadcast product that pulls back the veil and lets us hear big stretches of what it's like when they're trying sounds out, getting abstract, being well and truly difficult-- exactly the sort of stuff other bands this stylish can be a little too quick to call finished and request your money for. It makes you think well of their quality control-- always taking extra time to refine themselves into a fascinating pop band, even when they sound this good without bothering, just having their fun with the "interesting" part.
