Spell Blanket - Collected Demos 2006 - 2009
A 36-track anthology of 4-track and minidisc recordings from Trish Keenan's archive, 'Spell Blanket' is as close as we're gonna get to Broadcast's mythical fifth album, and it's a labyrinthine heart-melter. Not just a selection of demos like 'Distant Call', this one's a fuzzy image of what the finished album might have been, with psychedelic synth experiments, organ jams, hymnals and tape-mangled poems interrupting Keenan and James Cargill's unmistakable reverb-drenched arrangements. We can hardly believe it's finally been released.
When Keenan passed away in 2011, Broadcast's fifth album - the follow-up to 2009's smudgy 'Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age' - was already partly conceptualised. Cargill has been tweaking the tracks for years, making sure Keenan's vocals were mixed properly and figuring out which of her vast archive of ideas and experiments might best illustrate their vision for the record. Posthumous albums are always tricky, but Cargill's done wonders with 'Spell Blanket', arranging the recordings into an album that's unexpectedly coherent, a patchwork of short improvisations and fully-fledged songs that vividly indicate the direction the duo were heading in as they continued to furrow out the sweet spot between nostalgia, abstraction and pop. There are traces of their earlier material (particularly 'Haha Sound'), but 'Spell Blanket' has its own distinct signature, prophetically bringing in discernible church music influences while simultaneously following the Luboš Fišer-inspired thread they'd tracked while stitching together their 'Berberian Sound Studio' score.
The album starts with 'The Song Before The Song Comes Out', a disarming dictaphone recording of Keenan singing to herself as she walks, seemingly making up the words as she goes along. It gives the lengthy set important context; while Keenan and Cargill dress their songs in heady artistic references and studied historical drapery, they refuse to forget what's at the heart of their work: the kind of ancestral ear-worms that have been hummed and re-engineered in fields, public houses, workhouses, chapels and playgrounds for centuries. So when the album gets started properly with 'March of the Fleas', it makes sense when Keenan mimics a choir, layering her blown-out oohs over chugging, distorted guitars. And on the jubilant 'Greater Than Joy' and the reverberant 'Singing Game', the other instrumentation disappears completely, replaced by soaring, familiar vocal loops. If all that wasn't enough, 'My Marble Eye' is even more blatant, just a taped church organ improvisation, and the chilling 'My Body' sounds like a late-night sermon. "Hold the light for me my body," Keenan mouthes in monastic tones as if she's reciting lines from a long-forgotten gnostic text.
"Look into the light", she echoes over wooly 'Music Has The Right To Children'-style synths on the brilliant 'Follow the Light'. But these themes are balanced with more cavalier expressions; the ghostly traces of folk that haunted Broadcast's material since the beginning is more corporeal on tracks like 'Infant Girl', 'I Want to Be Fine' and the crumbly, organ-laced 'The Clock Is On Fire'. Keenan and Cargill draw from the library psych wellspring on built-out cuts like 'Hip Bone to Hip Bone', 'Running Back to Me' and 'The Games You Play', a catchy would-be single if we've ever heard one. The most surprising moment though is 'Dream Power', a pulsating, technoid dub experiment that makes us wonder what the future could have given us. And by the time we get to the final track, 'Spirit House', the book closes with dusty organs and phased breaks that hark back to Broadcast's crucial earliest EPs. It's an epic, sprawling set of tracks that gives us an impression of what might have been, a selection of cryptic clues from one of the most gifted songwriters of the last few decades.
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A 36-track anthology of 4-track and minidisc recordings from Trish Keenan's archive, 'Spell Blanket' is as close as we're gonna get to Broadcast's mythical fifth album, and it's a labyrinthine heart-melter. Not just a selection of demos like 'Distant Call', this one's a fuzzy image of what the finished album might have been, with psychedelic synth experiments, organ jams, hymnals and tape-mangled poems interrupting Keenan and James Cargill's unmistakable reverb-drenched arrangements. We can hardly believe it's finally been released.
When Keenan passed away in 2011, Broadcast's fifth album - the follow-up to 2009's smudgy 'Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age' - was already partly conceptualised. Cargill has been tweaking the tracks for years, making sure Keenan's vocals were mixed properly and figuring out which of her vast archive of ideas and experiments might best illustrate their vision for the record. Posthumous albums are always tricky, but Cargill's done wonders with 'Spell Blanket', arranging the recordings into an album that's unexpectedly coherent, a patchwork of short improvisations and fully-fledged songs that vividly indicate the direction the duo were heading in as they continued to furrow out the sweet spot between nostalgia, abstraction and pop. There are traces of their earlier material (particularly 'Haha Sound'), but 'Spell Blanket' has its own distinct signature, prophetically bringing in discernible church music influences while simultaneously following the Luboš Fišer-inspired thread they'd tracked while stitching together their 'Berberian Sound Studio' score.
The album starts with 'The Song Before The Song Comes Out', a disarming dictaphone recording of Keenan singing to herself as she walks, seemingly making up the words as she goes along. It gives the lengthy set important context; while Keenan and Cargill dress their songs in heady artistic references and studied historical drapery, they refuse to forget what's at the heart of their work: the kind of ancestral ear-worms that have been hummed and re-engineered in fields, public houses, workhouses, chapels and playgrounds for centuries. So when the album gets started properly with 'March of the Fleas', it makes sense when Keenan mimics a choir, layering her blown-out oohs over chugging, distorted guitars. And on the jubilant 'Greater Than Joy' and the reverberant 'Singing Game', the other instrumentation disappears completely, replaced by soaring, familiar vocal loops. If all that wasn't enough, 'My Marble Eye' is even more blatant, just a taped church organ improvisation, and the chilling 'My Body' sounds like a late-night sermon. "Hold the light for me my body," Keenan mouthes in monastic tones as if she's reciting lines from a long-forgotten gnostic text.
"Look into the light", she echoes over wooly 'Music Has The Right To Children'-style synths on the brilliant 'Follow the Light'. But these themes are balanced with more cavalier expressions; the ghostly traces of folk that haunted Broadcast's material since the beginning is more corporeal on tracks like 'Infant Girl', 'I Want to Be Fine' and the crumbly, organ-laced 'The Clock Is On Fire'. Keenan and Cargill draw from the library psych wellspring on built-out cuts like 'Hip Bone to Hip Bone', 'Running Back to Me' and 'The Games You Play', a catchy would-be single if we've ever heard one. The most surprising moment though is 'Dream Power', a pulsating, technoid dub experiment that makes us wonder what the future could have given us. And by the time we get to the final track, 'Spirit House', the book closes with dusty organs and phased breaks that hark back to Broadcast's crucial earliest EPs. It's an epic, sprawling set of tracks that gives us an impression of what might have been, a selection of cryptic clues from one of the most gifted songwriters of the last few decades.
A 36-track anthology of 4-track and minidisc recordings from Trish Keenan's archive, 'Spell Blanket' is as close as we're gonna get to Broadcast's mythical fifth album, and it's a labyrinthine heart-melter. Not just a selection of demos like 'Distant Call', this one's a fuzzy image of what the finished album might have been, with psychedelic synth experiments, organ jams, hymnals and tape-mangled poems interrupting Keenan and James Cargill's unmistakable reverb-drenched arrangements. We can hardly believe it's finally been released.
When Keenan passed away in 2011, Broadcast's fifth album - the follow-up to 2009's smudgy 'Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age' - was already partly conceptualised. Cargill has been tweaking the tracks for years, making sure Keenan's vocals were mixed properly and figuring out which of her vast archive of ideas and experiments might best illustrate their vision for the record. Posthumous albums are always tricky, but Cargill's done wonders with 'Spell Blanket', arranging the recordings into an album that's unexpectedly coherent, a patchwork of short improvisations and fully-fledged songs that vividly indicate the direction the duo were heading in as they continued to furrow out the sweet spot between nostalgia, abstraction and pop. There are traces of their earlier material (particularly 'Haha Sound'), but 'Spell Blanket' has its own distinct signature, prophetically bringing in discernible church music influences while simultaneously following the Luboš Fišer-inspired thread they'd tracked while stitching together their 'Berberian Sound Studio' score.
The album starts with 'The Song Before The Song Comes Out', a disarming dictaphone recording of Keenan singing to herself as she walks, seemingly making up the words as she goes along. It gives the lengthy set important context; while Keenan and Cargill dress their songs in heady artistic references and studied historical drapery, they refuse to forget what's at the heart of their work: the kind of ancestral ear-worms that have been hummed and re-engineered in fields, public houses, workhouses, chapels and playgrounds for centuries. So when the album gets started properly with 'March of the Fleas', it makes sense when Keenan mimics a choir, layering her blown-out oohs over chugging, distorted guitars. And on the jubilant 'Greater Than Joy' and the reverberant 'Singing Game', the other instrumentation disappears completely, replaced by soaring, familiar vocal loops. If all that wasn't enough, 'My Marble Eye' is even more blatant, just a taped church organ improvisation, and the chilling 'My Body' sounds like a late-night sermon. "Hold the light for me my body," Keenan mouthes in monastic tones as if she's reciting lines from a long-forgotten gnostic text.
"Look into the light", she echoes over wooly 'Music Has The Right To Children'-style synths on the brilliant 'Follow the Light'. But these themes are balanced with more cavalier expressions; the ghostly traces of folk that haunted Broadcast's material since the beginning is more corporeal on tracks like 'Infant Girl', 'I Want to Be Fine' and the crumbly, organ-laced 'The Clock Is On Fire'. Keenan and Cargill draw from the library psych wellspring on built-out cuts like 'Hip Bone to Hip Bone', 'Running Back to Me' and 'The Games You Play', a catchy would-be single if we've ever heard one. The most surprising moment though is 'Dream Power', a pulsating, technoid dub experiment that makes us wonder what the future could have given us. And by the time we get to the final track, 'Spirit House', the book closes with dusty organs and phased breaks that hark back to Broadcast's crucial earliest EPs. It's an epic, sprawling set of tracks that gives us an impression of what might have been, a selection of cryptic clues from one of the most gifted songwriters of the last few decades.
A 36-track anthology of 4-track and minidisc recordings from Trish Keenan's archive, 'Spell Blanket' is as close as we're gonna get to Broadcast's mythical fifth album, and it's a labyrinthine heart-melter. Not just a selection of demos like 'Distant Call', this one's a fuzzy image of what the finished album might have been, with psychedelic synth experiments, organ jams, hymnals and tape-mangled poems interrupting Keenan and James Cargill's unmistakable reverb-drenched arrangements. We can hardly believe it's finally been released.
When Keenan passed away in 2011, Broadcast's fifth album - the follow-up to 2009's smudgy 'Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age' - was already partly conceptualised. Cargill has been tweaking the tracks for years, making sure Keenan's vocals were mixed properly and figuring out which of her vast archive of ideas and experiments might best illustrate their vision for the record. Posthumous albums are always tricky, but Cargill's done wonders with 'Spell Blanket', arranging the recordings into an album that's unexpectedly coherent, a patchwork of short improvisations and fully-fledged songs that vividly indicate the direction the duo were heading in as they continued to furrow out the sweet spot between nostalgia, abstraction and pop. There are traces of their earlier material (particularly 'Haha Sound'), but 'Spell Blanket' has its own distinct signature, prophetically bringing in discernible church music influences while simultaneously following the Luboš Fišer-inspired thread they'd tracked while stitching together their 'Berberian Sound Studio' score.
The album starts with 'The Song Before The Song Comes Out', a disarming dictaphone recording of Keenan singing to herself as she walks, seemingly making up the words as she goes along. It gives the lengthy set important context; while Keenan and Cargill dress their songs in heady artistic references and studied historical drapery, they refuse to forget what's at the heart of their work: the kind of ancestral ear-worms that have been hummed and re-engineered in fields, public houses, workhouses, chapels and playgrounds for centuries. So when the album gets started properly with 'March of the Fleas', it makes sense when Keenan mimics a choir, layering her blown-out oohs over chugging, distorted guitars. And on the jubilant 'Greater Than Joy' and the reverberant 'Singing Game', the other instrumentation disappears completely, replaced by soaring, familiar vocal loops. If all that wasn't enough, 'My Marble Eye' is even more blatant, just a taped church organ improvisation, and the chilling 'My Body' sounds like a late-night sermon. "Hold the light for me my body," Keenan mouthes in monastic tones as if she's reciting lines from a long-forgotten gnostic text.
"Look into the light", she echoes over wooly 'Music Has The Right To Children'-style synths on the brilliant 'Follow the Light'. But these themes are balanced with more cavalier expressions; the ghostly traces of folk that haunted Broadcast's material since the beginning is more corporeal on tracks like 'Infant Girl', 'I Want to Be Fine' and the crumbly, organ-laced 'The Clock Is On Fire'. Keenan and Cargill draw from the library psych wellspring on built-out cuts like 'Hip Bone to Hip Bone', 'Running Back to Me' and 'The Games You Play', a catchy would-be single if we've ever heard one. The most surprising moment though is 'Dream Power', a pulsating, technoid dub experiment that makes us wonder what the future could have given us. And by the time we get to the final track, 'Spirit House', the book closes with dusty organs and phased breaks that hark back to Broadcast's crucial earliest EPs. It's an epic, sprawling set of tracks that gives us an impression of what might have been, a selection of cryptic clues from one of the most gifted songwriters of the last few decades.
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A 36-track anthology of 4-track and minidisc recordings from Trish Keenan's archive, 'Spell Blanket' is as close as we're gonna get to Broadcast's mythical fifth album, and it's a labyrinthine heart-melter. Not just a selection of demos like 'Distant Call', this one's a fuzzy image of what the finished album might have been, with psychedelic synth experiments, organ jams, hymnals and tape-mangled poems interrupting Keenan and James Cargill's unmistakable reverb-drenched arrangements. We can hardly believe it's finally been released.
When Keenan passed away in 2011, Broadcast's fifth album - the follow-up to 2009's smudgy 'Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age' - was already partly conceptualised. Cargill has been tweaking the tracks for years, making sure Keenan's vocals were mixed properly and figuring out which of her vast archive of ideas and experiments might best illustrate their vision for the record. Posthumous albums are always tricky, but Cargill's done wonders with 'Spell Blanket', arranging the recordings into an album that's unexpectedly coherent, a patchwork of short improvisations and fully-fledged songs that vividly indicate the direction the duo were heading in as they continued to furrow out the sweet spot between nostalgia, abstraction and pop. There are traces of their earlier material (particularly 'Haha Sound'), but 'Spell Blanket' has its own distinct signature, prophetically bringing in discernible church music influences while simultaneously following the Luboš Fišer-inspired thread they'd tracked while stitching together their 'Berberian Sound Studio' score.
The album starts with 'The Song Before The Song Comes Out', a disarming dictaphone recording of Keenan singing to herself as she walks, seemingly making up the words as she goes along. It gives the lengthy set important context; while Keenan and Cargill dress their songs in heady artistic references and studied historical drapery, they refuse to forget what's at the heart of their work: the kind of ancestral ear-worms that have been hummed and re-engineered in fields, public houses, workhouses, chapels and playgrounds for centuries. So when the album gets started properly with 'March of the Fleas', it makes sense when Keenan mimics a choir, layering her blown-out oohs over chugging, distorted guitars. And on the jubilant 'Greater Than Joy' and the reverberant 'Singing Game', the other instrumentation disappears completely, replaced by soaring, familiar vocal loops. If all that wasn't enough, 'My Marble Eye' is even more blatant, just a taped church organ improvisation, and the chilling 'My Body' sounds like a late-night sermon. "Hold the light for me my body," Keenan mouthes in monastic tones as if she's reciting lines from a long-forgotten gnostic text.
"Look into the light", she echoes over wooly 'Music Has The Right To Children'-style synths on the brilliant 'Follow the Light'. But these themes are balanced with more cavalier expressions; the ghostly traces of folk that haunted Broadcast's material since the beginning is more corporeal on tracks like 'Infant Girl', 'I Want to Be Fine' and the crumbly, organ-laced 'The Clock Is On Fire'. Keenan and Cargill draw from the library psych wellspring on built-out cuts like 'Hip Bone to Hip Bone', 'Running Back to Me' and 'The Games You Play', a catchy would-be single if we've ever heard one. The most surprising moment though is 'Dream Power', a pulsating, technoid dub experiment that makes us wonder what the future could have given us. And by the time we get to the final track, 'Spirit House', the book closes with dusty organs and phased breaks that hark back to Broadcast's crucial earliest EPs. It's an epic, sprawling set of tracks that gives us an impression of what might have been, a selection of cryptic clues from one of the most gifted songwriters of the last few decades.
CD in slipcase with 12 page booklet.
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A 36-track anthology of 4-track and minidisc recordings from Trish Keenan's archive, 'Spell Blanket' is as close as we're gonna get to Broadcast's mythical fifth album, and it's a labyrinthine heart-melter. Not just a selection of demos like 'Distant Call', this one's a fuzzy image of what the finished album might have been, with psychedelic synth experiments, organ jams, hymnals and tape-mangled poems interrupting Keenan and James Cargill's unmistakable reverb-drenched arrangements. We can hardly believe it's finally been released.
When Keenan passed away in 2011, Broadcast's fifth album - the follow-up to 2009's smudgy 'Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age' - was already partly conceptualised. Cargill has been tweaking the tracks for years, making sure Keenan's vocals were mixed properly and figuring out which of her vast archive of ideas and experiments might best illustrate their vision for the record. Posthumous albums are always tricky, but Cargill's done wonders with 'Spell Blanket', arranging the recordings into an album that's unexpectedly coherent, a patchwork of short improvisations and fully-fledged songs that vividly indicate the direction the duo were heading in as they continued to furrow out the sweet spot between nostalgia, abstraction and pop. There are traces of their earlier material (particularly 'Haha Sound'), but 'Spell Blanket' has its own distinct signature, prophetically bringing in discernible church music influences while simultaneously following the Luboš Fišer-inspired thread they'd tracked while stitching together their 'Berberian Sound Studio' score.
The album starts with 'The Song Before The Song Comes Out', a disarming dictaphone recording of Keenan singing to herself as she walks, seemingly making up the words as she goes along. It gives the lengthy set important context; while Keenan and Cargill dress their songs in heady artistic references and studied historical drapery, they refuse to forget what's at the heart of their work: the kind of ancestral ear-worms that have been hummed and re-engineered in fields, public houses, workhouses, chapels and playgrounds for centuries. So when the album gets started properly with 'March of the Fleas', it makes sense when Keenan mimics a choir, layering her blown-out oohs over chugging, distorted guitars. And on the jubilant 'Greater Than Joy' and the reverberant 'Singing Game', the other instrumentation disappears completely, replaced by soaring, familiar vocal loops. If all that wasn't enough, 'My Marble Eye' is even more blatant, just a taped church organ improvisation, and the chilling 'My Body' sounds like a late-night sermon. "Hold the light for me my body," Keenan mouthes in monastic tones as if she's reciting lines from a long-forgotten gnostic text.
"Look into the light", she echoes over wooly 'Music Has The Right To Children'-style synths on the brilliant 'Follow the Light'. But these themes are balanced with more cavalier expressions; the ghostly traces of folk that haunted Broadcast's material since the beginning is more corporeal on tracks like 'Infant Girl', 'I Want to Be Fine' and the crumbly, organ-laced 'The Clock Is On Fire'. Keenan and Cargill draw from the library psych wellspring on built-out cuts like 'Hip Bone to Hip Bone', 'Running Back to Me' and 'The Games You Play', a catchy would-be single if we've ever heard one. The most surprising moment though is 'Dream Power', a pulsating, technoid dub experiment that makes us wonder what the future could have given us. And by the time we get to the final track, 'Spirit House', the book closes with dusty organs and phased breaks that hark back to Broadcast's crucial earliest EPs. It's an epic, sprawling set of tracks that gives us an impression of what might have been, a selection of cryptic clues from one of the most gifted songwriters of the last few decades.