The new Broadcast album, in the company of Julian House’s Focus Group, has proved to be one of those records that resist, in some way, being written about. Perhaps it may be something to do with how “Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age” is a slippery, fragmentary listen; a collage of 23 disjointed, often dislocated snippets that feel as if they’ve been harvested from a dusty collection of neglected old soundtracks. An album that slips in and out of focus and of your attention, sneaking up when you least expect it.
Following on from yesterday’s catch-up session (thanks for the Gothenburg report on J Tillman and dulcimer, by the way), another bunch of stuff today that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while.
I have to admit, rather pathetically, that my cumulative knowledge of claymation is limited to the exploits of Morph on Tony Hart’s TV shows and, of course, Wallace And Gromit. Profoundly ill-equipped as I am, I nonetheless caught up with Mary And Max this afternoon. I will report now that this is some clear distance away from the cosy world of Aardman. Oh, yep.
More grade-A new psych from San Francisco today, with this third album from a quintet bearing the cosmically unwieldy name of Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound.
In my ignorance, the last time I blogged about the Flower-Corsano Duo, I wrote some stuff about Mick Flower’s instrument, the shahi baaja, and described it, as per the press-release, as a "Japanese electric dulcimer/autoharp".
