The award-winning, genre-bending ‘musical group’ Public Service Broadcasting have released their new album, Every Valley, which purports to tell the story of Welsh Coal. How will this fare, being told by a group only really known as ‘progressive’?
Public Service Broadcasting is the brainchild of J. Willgoose Esq, who’s solo project was quickly joined by Wrigglesworth (one word only) and JF Abraham, all on a variety of tech and instruments.
Every Valley leads in with energetic strings signalling the opening crescendo of this opening track, and title track of the album. It is quickly joined by a mix of gentle picked, and mildly overdriven guitar which perfectly underscores the sampled spoken word about coal miners, and the collective ambition of the young boys of the area mentioned, was to become the miners, the kings of the underworld. The song not only starts strong, but continues on, dramatically so, joined by a fascinating mix of understated drums and even a flugelhorn. This rise and fall of song carries us downwards into The Pit, the following song.
The sampled vocals return, sounding, with no pun intended, like a public service broadcast about coal mining. The song takes a more ominous turn with a transition to a more minor key, with an air of urgency and even danger about it as the sampled spoken word turns to talk about potential explosions and landslides as we are taken down, into the mine of this set of songs. Towards the end of the song, it becomes more guitar led, retaining its sense of urgency and drama through a mix of brass cut through with gentle but somehow driving guitar. Despite a rapid change in tone, the ‘story’ of the first two songs continues in People Will Always Need Coal. The song returns to the strings of the first song, seeming to have come full circle, but leading us away and above the mines by way of a more electronic melody, with a positive, if a little bittersweet message about South Wales coal mining before its tragic decline, heralding an end to the opening gapless odyssey of the song.
With a lack of their own native vocalist, the band has drafted in several guest vocalists, taking up four out of their eleven tracks on the album. Tracyanne Campbell features on Progress, her own dreamy melody lilting over the spoken samples of Welsh coal mining broadcasts whilst an indie riff shot through with different electronic effects underlines the whole piece, there’s even some Maggie Thatcher to be heard on the piece.
As you could probably expect from any basic knowledge of Thatcher’s government or the destruction of the Welsh coal industry, there is a track that aims to articulate some of the righteous anger of the miners, All Out is this track. It’s built up by Go To The Road then, in contrast to the preceding songs, positively rampages into gear. With samples of the disillusioned miners, and their families, a much heavier guitar and drum mix provides raw instrumentals to the raw emotion.
I’ll have to admit, even after a full listen through, I’m still not totally convinced on the band’s angle to using their album to try to tell the story of Welsh coal in their ‘tongue-in-cheek’ manner, when the area still bears the scars of the devastating hit to South Wales on a total socio-political and economic scale; it frankly feels a little insensitive from a group of South London boys at points. That said, as the anger begins to take hold in their songs, the use of James Dean Bradfield, of South Wales himself, and lead singer of Manic Street Preachers, it actually scores a point in their favour, it doesn’t feel like tokenism and feels more sensitive and appropriate.
The anger begins to subside; as it must, and as it did. The song turns to defiance in the form of They Gave Me A Lamp, with clips from public archives on the response to the crisis from women, and their response to the macrocosm of the issue; it also turns to the micro-issues as well and hope, from You + Me. In the latter, Lisa Jen Brown layers her gorgeous ‘Welsh’ choral vocals over a minimalist track which actually features a rare appearance from Willgoose in the form of his not-unimpressive vocals.
Mother Of The Village and Take Me Home lead us out of the album, both of which with more of the level of melancholy you’d expect for a story that, if it has ended, is not the fairytale that many would have wished for. Take Me Home is an emotive end to the album, with no trace of the electronics, vibraslap or flugelhorn. It is simple, the miners and choristers; evocative of South Wales’ pastoral imagery prior to the end of the mines, singing together, an emotional end to the journey.
The album overall, is ingenious. The engineering is masterful and production is clearly done with painstaking attention to detail. Asides from the few appropriation concerns I raised previously, the band have outdone themselves.
Author: Steve, Southgate store
