Broadcast's Distant Call - a lingering word in your ear

Hello and a happy Friday to you all. This is a one-off, mini newsletter, which I felt I had to release as I love Broadcast so much and they have a new, final album out this week. Normal service resumes on Wednesday, with more dance music past and present.

Broadcast: Distant Call - Collected Demos 2000 - 2006

Spell Blanket, the last Broadcast demo album, pointed towards a possible future for the band, a fifth album that could have been had Trish Keenan not died of pneumonia in January 2011. Distant Call, the second and final demo collection, is more of a relic: what the band - and especially Keenan - did on the path to their eventual destinations, a collection of demos for songs that are largely known to Broadcast fans, including versions of Tears in the Typing Tool, Colour Me In and Pendulum, classics all.

Much as on Spell Blanket, these demos are scratchy and minimal. Most consist of just acoustic guitar and Keenan's vocal, occasionally double tracked, which is an interesting perspective for a band who wrote brilliant songs but were also incredibly skilled at working them up. On the plus side, there is an unbelievable intimacy to these demos, which give the impression that Keenan is there with you in the room, underlined by the frequent throat clearings and occasional bum notes. On the negative, some songs pale in comparison to their later bells-and-whistles incarnations. Colour Me In, for example, really misses the detuned violin screech of the album version, which I find myself mentally filling in every time I hear the demo.

What’s more, while Broadcast always did a fantastic job in bulking up and weirding out their songs, the underlying melodies and structures didn't often change. So these demos are rarely revelatory, the possible exception being Pendulum, where the accent and feel of the melody has changed from demo to Haha Sound. For fans of Pendulum - and it is one of my favourite Broadcast songs - it feels a little strange, as if Trish’s oblong vocal has been forced into a round hole. But I think that’s just familiarity ringing the bell.

The real gems on Distant Call are Come Back To Me and Please Call To Book, songs that James Cargill (the other half of Broadcast) only discovered after Keenan’s death. You could, I suppose, argue that they’re more Trish solo efforts than Broadcast songs in their current state, given that one half of the band didn’t even know about them. But their incredible strength makes this seem entirely irrelevant. 

Come Back To Me, in particular, is one of the greatest songs that Keenan ever put her voice to, a swirling, yearning piece of English folk music that you could imagine being hundreds of years old. You may well shed a tear. Please Call To Book, meanwhile, is one of those twisty, turny, happy-sad Broadcast songs, to which I can almost hear the vast psychedelic conclusion that never came to be. 

I hope it’s not being overly morbid to compare Distant Call to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged, two albums that were never intended to be a band’s final word but inadvertently became them. Distant Call offers a similar appeal to Unplugged, namely the opportunity to hear some of your favourite songs in stripped-back versions, with just the occasional additional revelation. And just as the Unplugged version of About A Girl won’t replace the punked-up Beatles original in my affections, Distant Call’s thorny, minimalist take on Ominous Cloud isn’t going to erase HaHa Sound’s towering psychedelic original from my musical memory. But there will certainly be room for both, as and when mood demands.

Cargill has said that Distant Call will be the final release from Broadcast, which means no live album, no dodgy remixes and no attempt to polish up Keenan’s final demos into burly, full-band assaults. Distant Call is a subtle, understated final word, which feels right for a band who never had to shout, bustle or kowtow to the lowest common denominator to make their voice heard; a last hidden jewel from a group who made surprise their modus operandi.