The Man In The Time Machine Knows When

Broadcast “Colour in the Numbers”

The opening track on Spell Blanket, a collection of demos Broadcast created between 2006 and 2009 for a follow-up to Tender Buttons that never came to be, is a brief recording of Trish Keenan singing a snippet of a hook while walking around outside. It sounds like it’s just come to her in a flash of inspiration, there’s a slight hestitation as she sings some of the words as though she’s figuring out the phrasing as she’s going along. You can hear her steps, you can hear some ambient noise. The song sounds like it would’ve been amazing, perhaps even something career-defining, but this is all we have of it. It’s a trade off, I suppose – a fully realized ballad, or a document of an artist at work and truly being herself not long before she died. I like having this recording, I like feeling close to Trish in this moment. I like hearing her be creative and alive.

Some of the songs on Spell Blanket are more or less fully formed, albeit fairly lo-fi. The lo-fi sound suits the out-of-time quality of Broadcast’s music, making the music sound like it’s from either 60 years ago or 60 years from now. It makes the name of the band seem more literal, like we’re hearing something that was transmitted at some point and recorded for posterity. Keenan’s melodies often sound incredibly old and extremely English, like she was tapped into some Jungian collective unconscious of British folk melodies.

“Colour in the Numbers,” one of the most fully realized tracks on the collection, sounds so familiar that I figure it must be drawing on something I’ve encountered at some point. A traditional melody, something very old or religious? Something from a lost BBC children’s show from the mid 20th century? Is that loop a sample, even if Keenan and James Cargill are the only credited songwriters? In any case, the overdubbed harmonies are a wonderful showcase for Keenan’s distinctive voice. She sounds childlike, she sounds like an adult, she sounds like an android, she sounds like a ghost. She sounds like she knows something, and this is the closest we’ll get to figuring out what it was.

Buy it from Warp Records.