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Broadcast - Before We Begin
Haha Sound
2003
Although I’ve used this list to try and defy this fact; creativity in rock has reached its lowest point in the 21st Century. Far too much late 60s/late 70s revivalism, as well as a loss of maverick ideas and forward thinking in favour of career safety and conformity. Some of the century's best bands – Animal Collective, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti and Broadcast – have brought a freshness in sound and influence, and created their own distinct worlds with their music, inviting us to traverse and sample these strange waves. Broadcast’s world is a paradoxical one; a world of retroism and futurism, the coming technological age as sounded through a old transistor radio. Their restless analog syths and grainy cinematic soundscapes recall Joe Meek and 60s psych legends The United State Of America. 'Before We Begin' is perhaps their best pop moment. Trish Keenan’s vocals, as ever, are the embodiment of foggy psychedelia and whimsy, rolling the words from her tongue like candy cotton balls. Her intonation on the chorus (“wait you may wiiin. . . .before we begin . . . again”) is especially exquisite and it’s all backed with a tough, crisp offbeat rhythm. Keenan’s death at the beginning of the year was truly a sad loss in a world of chancers and false idols. But you can hear her here in 'Before We Begin', shimmering through the thunderclaps of percussion like a ray of sunshine from that strange, better world. The lines “here again, at the end, before the beginning” and “here they hide, on one side. And me on the other” now contain a gravitas that can make me weep.