“We’ve only been on tour for three days and everything is fucked,” says Broken Records lead singer Jamie Sutherland. The band have broken off their performance in West London’s Bush Hall, faced with short-lived technical difficulties. But if this is Broken Records when things go wrong, seeing them on a good night must be mind-blowing.
White Belt Yellow Tag provide a compatible warm up and a pleasing enough precursor, but are sadly forgettable compared to what follows – the sparklers to this evening’s sky-filling rockets, if you will (it is the 5th of November after all).
Broken Records have, now infamously, been called the ‘Scottish Arcade Fire’, and onstage the seven-piece have a similarly bold presence and epic reach. Their arrangements are often dense enough to be called chamber pop, but musically they far more often swerve to folk-inspired instrumentation, either connecting with their Celtic roots or drawing from continental traditions with accordion and gypsy violin.
While debut album ‘Until The Earth Begins To Part’ is dominated by melancholy and even flirts with despair, much of Broken Records’ performance tonight is more about making people dance. Sutherland has been criticised for overblown melody lines that drown out the rest of the band, but onstage the whole band come alive, revealing both the subtleties of their more tender songs and the wildness of their most fierce ones.
The audience (who admittedly don’t fill the suitably opulent venue) are transfixed into silence one minute and fired up into frantic dancing the next, and call the band out for a triumphant encore. Fireworks might be exploding outside but the night’s real celebrations are going on in here.
Words by Steve Harris
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Read ClashMusic’s Ones To Watch feature on the band, from March 2008, HERE
