Rating: NNN
Two years before Broadcast vocalist Trish Keenan’s untimely death in January 2011, the band released their strangest album yet, Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age, with psych-weirdo the Focus Group. Much of it was devoid of the English band’s eccentric pop sensibilities, instead embracing dark experimentalism.
It makes sense, then, that Keenan and sole remaining band member James Cargill’s final album together continues that hauntological pursuit. It’s the soundtrack to Berberian Sound Studio, a surrealist film set in the 1970s chronicling a mild-mannered sound engineer’s decline into madness while working on an Italian horror film.
Disturbing keyboard melodies, crashing drums and disorienting organs float eerily along, with snippets of the film’s dialogue – i.e., blood-curdling screams and frantic whispers in Italian – interspersed throughout. The best songs are the few featuring Keenan’s lovely voice, like Teresa, Lark Of Ascension, which serves as a sad reminder of the talent we lost.
Top track: Teresa, Lark Of Ascension
