Now a trio following the departure of original member Roj Stevens in 2002, Broadcast release ‘HaHa Sound’ off the back of the excellent ‘Pendulum’ EP.
Coming somewhere between Pram, Stereolab and the Pizzicato Five and sharing their influence amoungst everyone from Ladytron , Toktok Vs Soffy O to the nursery freak outs of Lemon Jelly, Broadcasts’ Trisha Keenan, James Cargill and Tim Felton pursue the hugely whimsical and melodic grooves of 60s psychedelia stretched out on a broad canvass of crackling electronica and jazzy beat manoeuvres. Try thinking of all the craziest and wackiest eccentricities of 60s pop – The Monkee’s ‘Headquarters’, The Monkee’s ‘Head’, the Velvet Underground — and you’ll have it pretty well imagined. Combine this with the faintly sinister though attractive Roy Budd ‘Get Carter’ soundtrack and you’ll have got a perfect match. ‘Before We Begin’ is the most delicious of cocktail-lounge seductions, ‘DisTORTION’ — the most thoroughly avante-garde and pernicious.
Surreal, somnolent and fleshed out with the prettiest of melodies, tracks like ‘Colour Me In’, ‘Lunch Hour Pops’ and ‘The Little Bell’ recover all the joyful lost treasures of childhood: innocence, simplicity and oh so fragile profundity. The tunes, however, extend well beyond the remits of lullaby and to focus on the simplicity alone would be to overlook the impeccable attention to detail the album possesses. Listening to these songs is much like scraping away at the flakey oils and layers of a classic image to reveal the lost, wiry sketches that make up it’s damn-near beautiful archaeology. And yes, it’s as deep as it is high.
It now seems wholly deserved that their debut album, ‘The Noise Made By People’ spent a whopping three years in the making. ‘HaHa Sound’ is likewise a very deliberate undertaking and all the more successful for it.