- “Where are the folks like you and I?” The question is posed on the recent single, Velvet Paradise, from the new record by southern duo, Broads. It has hidden depth, multiple meanings and it’s central to what’s going on here. By turns it has elements that are pouting and plaintive, mysterious, menacing, seductive and melancholy. If you were going to try and boil it down to one thing I guess it would be this: Broads questions what it is, in the present day, to be a dangerous woman.
When I last encountered them, Kelly Day and Jane Hendry were wringing an indecent amount of pleasure from singing at the top of their lungs on their first full-length, Vacancy. Coming from a background of close-harmony, acapella singing, they melded that with a more recent interest in the dark, retro pop of the ‘60s, ‘50s and still further back. The meeting was a very fruitful one, especially when they turned up the volume. Unlike a lot of crooners, Broads can really sing: sweetly but with enough volume to pin an audience to their chairs, like a case full of skewered insects.
At the same time, they were busy pulling apart the politics that went along with the pop-culture of yesterday. They reinvented the femme-fatale for the present day, turning around the sexism institutionalised in noir narratives. That, of course, is only the beginning. We rejoin our shadowy anti-heroines on their new album, Stay Connected, and things are still a little uncertain, a little alarming. Opener, Mirror, literally promises to be true, forever and that charming sentiment quickly becomes unnerving, even without the distorted noise slowly rising to obliterate the end of the track like an obliterating psychosis.
Interestingly, you don’t hear as much of Day and Hendry themselves, roaring like all-conquering sirens. Instead they choose to go quietly, singing little sadnesses like Emily, the story of a fallen girl, vanishing into the background and leaving us abandoned and alone at the party. “By the time I realised that she was gone we were watching fireworks on the neighbours lawn / The sparks they dissipate and the night’s not warm.” Even the comparatively jaunty riff of Velvet Paradise is at odds with its story of a bus ticket for a journey that leads only to emptiness. I don’t know whether I’m just too much of a lunk to notice it previously, but there’s a simmering same-sex undercurrent at work in Broads’ most recent work. It’s as mysterious as any of their other qualities: I find it difficult to know whether Day and Hendry are singing to each other, to some departed lover or some kind of philosophical other. In truth I think it shifts fluidly between these and more - indistinct figures that move in and out of focus, only coming into view when Broads care to conjure them.
The musical journey may be quieter, but that belies its adventurousness. The psychedelic overtones of Mushies gives Broads the excuse to slide into a nearly ambient dream-pop, melding with their existing taste for soft-rock and country and coming out somewhere near the dusty elegance of Mazzy Star. Longshot moseys along with intent, packing the slow burning power of something like Riders On The Storm, waiting under the eaves for the thunderhead to break. It does so with a burst of that vocal power we’ve barely heard since the last record and then a wail of sax; an almost unbearably deferred climax finally, explosively reaching its denouement. I Fed The Horse pairs beautifully with the fading pressure of the previous number. It’s a flood of confession which I feel like I don’t actually have enough information to understand, but in the pallid light, after those storm clouds disperse, the line “I’ve shown no remorse” is repeated in a way that’s powerfully affecting.
The closing stretch of the record is emotionally exhausted. Even lyrics like “climb on to my pyre and burn with me” are sung barely above a whisper. I’ve spent a deal of time wondering what the title Stay Connected means and often it could be a plea, a last ditch effort to hold on to someone and avoid fading out altogether. This record is a much more reserved, nuanced affair than what’s come before for Broads: so removed from the roaring energy of their previous album. Who is the woman, lurking in the shadowy music of Broads? I feel even less certain than before, but thanks to this record she remains in the back of mind, disturbing, elusive but unforgettable.
- Chris Cobcroft.