No Broadcast

In theory I shouldn’t like No Broadcast, there’s a lot of the traits and tropes I’m often disappointed by: ethereal intros that lead to almost nowhere, toms that sound throttled as opposed to tuned, bass guitar that’s played like rhythm guitar only, but that’s all just surface stuff. For all the Muse-iness of some of this (Collapse) I can also hear a pretty kick-ass band. And if opener Reset The Sun feels a little too Tool-like in its circular sweep of guitar effects then by the time of the slightly more direct, almost punk-ish Realise you can hear power-pop and hardcore elements, well, it’s almost like the very early U2 stuff actually – that sort of conviction at least.

As the songs stretch out toward the six-minute mark the ideas start to build. More Wrong Than Right is actually, as a song, quite the opposite – with more right stuff happening than the wrong. The wrong being it’s still easy to detect some Muse musings. But it also feels like Radiohead’s rocking-est moments reimagined for power trio.

That’s one of the joys of this album actually – the huge sweep that is offered by just three players. Constricted might be the highlight, the guitars and cymbals last at one another like the middle of a Jakob or Mountaineater tune, there’s that same hint of The Cure’s darkest, biggest, loudest moments – as was the case with Mountaineater’s often astonishingly good record.

The surge behind Drone Pt 1 reminds me of the last great Lou Reed song – Riptide, also that way that Swervedriver lifted shoegaze music up and off and in the vague direction of metal.

Drone Pt 2 shows the Tool-derived ideas working for this band, no longer seeming like they’re copying, everything’s falling into place here.

And the closer, Driven, has such an ominous crunch to it, before falling into a decent pop song, then meandering off into the swirl and whirl of post-rock that it is the perfect encapsulation of the ideas from earlier in the album, a closing snapshot.

Hey, it’s a name your price deal on Bandcamp. So for no other reason it would be worth a shot. But I liked this. Even though there was a lot about it, on first listen, that could have bugged me.