Goff's Pick of the Week- Tender Buttons by Broadcast

Lo-Fi is a word that I use a lot to describe some music, but let me tell you, in the next sentence Im about to use, the term Lo-Fi is probably the most applicable here among all the times ive used it. Broadcast is a Lo-Fi band. Harkening back to the early days of post punk where acts like The Jesus and Mary Chain in the eighties and Sebadoh in the nineties would take a sound, record it, and then produce it “into the red”, (by that I mean by turning the gain and the distortion and the fuzz up well beyond what the recording equipment manufacturer had intended) Broadcast is a band that sparked the beginning of post punk revival here in the twenty first century. And what is interesting is the way that they went about doing that, not by (as many other bands have done in the past) ripping off the sound of a great movement or specific band, but by taking a sound, by making it their own, and by  being good enough to have been contemporaries of the influencing bands. Its not hard to listen to Tender Buttons and think, “Wow when was this made?”.  You may read that and think, oh so they sound dated, but that’s not the case either. Broadcast are entirely innovative, they filled a hole in post punk music that post punk music didn’t know it had, a hole that has been around since the first drum beat of the innovative Psychocandy.   And at the same time that is the great tragedy of Broadcast, that instead of having been around for twenty years as Psychocandy and Bakesale have been now, at what is the height of Lo-Fi’s popularity, Tender Buttons will never really get to experience the same level of worship that those and other post punk albums have gotten, and even if Tender Buttons does receive praise somewhere down the road as it deserves, who will appreciate it? Their lead singer, Trish Keenan tragically died of pneumonia , breaking the hearts of everyone who has ever heard her sing, an abrupt end to a band that had everything going for it. The highlight from the album for me would have to be the track Michael A Grammar. It’s a fantastic tune that is as mysterious as it is strange. The electronic undertones give the track grainy and almost off-putting texture, the vocals soul. And while it stands out, the rest of the album is very good as well, the album touches on surreal as each track ends and the next begins, from one tune to the next. Since this album was released in 2005, it is not hard to find bands that have been influenced by Trish’s voice over crunchy electronics. She was good friends with Bradford Cox of Atlas Sound and his latest album Parallax is entirely dedicated to her.  Besides that, its not a stretch to say that acts like Neon Indian (who use electronic textures to highlight what might be a  singer/songwriter type performer otherwise) were influenced by Broadcast.