No Broadcast – The Common Thread (Album Review)

No Broadcast Their fourth album The Common Thread is awash in floating, dreamy ambient pop. Multi-layered like a Glass Onion, and the hooks come camouflaged in velvet.

The ongoing project of Josh Braden from Christchurch, celebrating the ten-year anniversary from his first album. The majority recorded at home, with a little help from his friends amongst the local musical enclave. Ryan Fisherman, Thomas Isbister and Tom Harris.

He has mentioned some key indicators to his musical approach as Radiohead, Sigur Ros and the Veils. That is a direction to the correct map, and you can add Brian Eno and some of the New York minimalists like Philip Glass for good measure.

Title track The Common Thread and it’s always good to start an album with one of the best. The guitars jangle and it has the textures of English shoe-gaze indie rock. Immediately striking is the tenor voice with climbs smoothly in the high tones. Braden sounds like a trained choir singer. Suggests the Associates and the striking vocals of Billy Mackenzie.

This segues straight into All & Now, six minutes of lush, pastoral monastic reverie. Minimal tension in the music conveying a Prozac stasis. Gets stark and minimal as you catch hints in the lyrics, of mysteries, foreign tours, daydreams.

The atmosphere is monochromatic. White fields of ice floes and thousands of birds.

The Space Between Us lets us in a little more. Unsettling and ominous as a David Lynch movie. Fragile mind/ Looking out/ Lost within/ Common ground. The sound comprises of simple drone elements matched to a soulful English voice, like parts the great Stone Roses debut album. There is a peak in the middle where the spaceman takes us.

These songs have taken time to gestate, like the previous albums. Addressing emotional trauma, a drifting soul, and likely the dissolution of spirit that the manufactured pandemic triggered.

I can’t stay here anymore is the opening lament on Road Signs. Some of the lyrical sensibilities of the Smiths. Smoother voice than Morrissey and it is both relaxing and edgy as those velvet hooks go in.

Terrified shimmers and drifts along, until other elements appear out of the rolling mist. A perfect example of the layers of the glass onion.

Etched is the closest to a conventional indie rock song. The opening guitar riffs are a muted take on the intro to the Stooges’ Search and Destroy. There are orchestral arrangements and a walking bass. Born into mystery/ Born into secrets. Then the music stays in the clouds, as a cello colours those clouds dark.

The Shore is beautifully sung, accompanied by a finger-picked acoustic guitar. Nothing is quite what it seems. A Gypsy accordion appears.

No Broadcast’s The Common Thread is bathed in a grey sky atmosphere. The kind that generates the warmth of negative ion energy. The layers reveal themselves on repeated listening.

⭐⭐⭐

Rev Orange Peel

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