Bleep

Returning after a two year absence in 2005, Broadcast’s newly shrunken lineup of Trish Keenan and James Cargill had gotten “fed up” with making sense, and as such made one of their most captivating and electrifying works ever. Their third album Tender Buttons was a departure from practically everything Broadcast knew as a band: from their sound, their members, their meaning. Guitarist Tim Felton left in the run up to the album, and alongside him the band’s 60s references dissolved into the voltage, where word games and marvellous textures make noise sweet with catchy contemporary pop brightness.

Stripped down to the essential components, the duo sought inspiration from Gertrude Stein and minimalist post-punk outfits like Young Marble Giants to create a record of pop melodies that maintained their signature melodrama; “a cyclone full of feeling” as Trish says on ‘Subject To The Ladder’ in between dazzling jets of raw electronics and pendulums of twanging guitars. Thanks to experimenting with automatic writing, her command of language gives these tracks a bird’s eye view of the world and its inhabitants, thunderstruck with sizzling electrical manipulations, cyclical guitars, and wildly swerving rushes of air on ‘Corporeal’ symbolising the tangled wires of body drama.

Tender Buttons would be the band’s last definitive statement in a solo full length record, with the album’s fabled followup emerging from Trish Keenan’s demo collections as their true final releases Spell Blanket and Distant Call in 2024. The already sparse ‘Tears In The Typing Pool’ is even further stripped back in its demo form, its pastoral domesticity rendered in simplistic strums and unadorned vocals, and imagistic lyrics further demonstrating Broadcast’s ability to bring real life experiences to record in inventive and effective ways. That’s part of what makes Tender Buttons so endlessly enriching; the stark minimalism was a first for Broadcast, but their enduring soundplay and songwriting triumphed once again.