Broadcast return after a two year absence with a stunning new album, ‘Tender Buttons’.

‘Tender Buttons’ is a new sound for the band and marks a new line up – now slimmed down to just the duo of Trish Keenan and James Cargill.

Gone are the clattering live drums to be replaced by sparse, hypnotic electronic drum beats, while Trish’s lyrics and haunting voice sound more direct than ever before. Trish takes centre-stage with this record, and even the inclusion of her image on the front cover art is a bold and new move for the band!

Blending their trademark influences of ‘60s pop, film soundtracks and the BBC Radiophonic workshop, ‘Tender Buttons’ stands out from their previous work in terms of its stripped back simplicity, its emotional boldness and a psychedelic darkness reminiscent of the Velvet Underground.

As lauded by critics and fellow musicians as they are, Broadcast have always been a band out of time – both ahead of their own generation and evoking a bygone age. And if in 2003 they sat slightly awkwardly alongside the fevered yelping of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the stripped down but ferocious White Stripes, in 2005 they remain more relevant than ever to the current UK indie revival.

“There is a theme of letting go on Tender Buttons” says Broadcast’s frontwoman Trish Keenan when describing the band's new album. “A flower lets go of its fragrance, Michael lets go of his past and I let go of my embarrassment of letting go.” As Trish’s musings suggest, Tender Buttons is a striking personal diary and a powerful sonic imprint of two peoples lives.

Trish elaborates, “Tender Buttons” is a solar system of songs. Each song has its own environment, its own set of inhabitants with their own psychological perspective on life.”
 
Read on for Trish Keenan’s own insight into the creation of Tender Buttons …

BROADCAST VISION - memory music
The Broadcast vision is the meeting of human emotion in the electronic world. The optimistic belief in the compatibility of man and machine. A nature and nurture approach to music. The potential of folk, nursery rhyme and electronica to provoke memory and imagination. The past set in the future. A retrospective lyric set in an electronic description of an organic world.

THE LYRICS
I repeat myself. I believe that through this unconscious repetition, I have been leaking messages to myself for years. Two words have come up again and again for me. These two words feature in a number of my songs and I have not realized it until now. The words are let go. I have been telling myself to let go for years. So much so I am claiming ownership of them. They are my words. I refuse to let go of them. They are going to be my reminders to let go. Perhaps my epitaph.

The lyrics of Tender Buttons were generated through automatic writing. They are my free falling thoughts. I believe that words have their own life. That if you throw words together randomly, they naturally make sense. Language just wants to be understood.

AMERICA’S BOY -The Single
The lyrics to 'America’s Boy' were generated by my reactions to a tabloid cryptic crossword. The clues were topically about the war in Iraq, and in general, their stance was one of anti-American occupation.

In my frustration at not being able to decipher the clues, I began to react to them, make up my own answers, mimicking back the language of the clues. I was interested then in possible answers. I got on a roll arguing with the clues, asking questions back, taking offence to them and deliberately misreading them. What came back was a sort of celebration of the American soldier. Snap shots of the heroics of American Imperialism, the all out impressiveness of its big achievements. Also something that the British do not have in their culture, a self celebratory nature of Americans towards their own country.

Broadcast are one of the keystones of British psych-pop and, now on their 4th album, put most of their current day competitors in the pale.

Broadcast’s 2003 album ‘HAHA Sound’ was released to extraordinary critical acclaim:

“Fantastic… brain music of remarkable potency. You are hereby advised to set your inner metronome, be seated and await lift off” 4/5 Q

“Transcend their cinematic influences effortlessly… Trish Keenan still conjures wondrous lyrical evocations of unspecific tenderness and yearning” 4/5 MOJO

“Glorious… the perfectionism here is palpable; but then, when something’s this perfect, you wonder why anybody else bothers” 5/5 MUZIK

“It works beautifully… the excessive detailing is a marvel… it’s a pop record, really, but its awareness of history and possibility removes it far from our expectations of pop. The sound of science moving backwards and forwards with, at its heart, a vocalist who humanises the experiment: still, true, emotionally constant” THE WIRE

“For all the analogue drones and krautrock echoes (it) sounds like folk music at heart… (but) the clattering drums and guitars make it a dizzying ride” 7/10 JOCKEYSLUT

“Twisted electronic pop… this band could soar”  XRAY

“There isn’t space to do them justice… like Birmingham’s answer to Francoise Hardy” 5/5 HOT STARS