Bella Union, the label set up by Cocteau Twins’ Simon Raymonde, is on a great run. Fleet Foxes, combining rapturous reviews with serious sales, are out in front, but it has a host of other artists worthy of attention – chiefly the Copenhagen-based, 21-year-old American Peter Broderick, whose album Home, a bewitching blend of classical and folk that burrows into your soul, was critically acclaimed last year.
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| Experimental intimacy: Peter Broderick |
Plaid of shirt, Broderick put all his invention into his music, created by layering vocal and instrumental loops. He is even better live than on disc, because you see the puppetmaster and the strings; in this case, those of piano, violin and acoustic guitar. Comparisons with José González were soon outstripped. While Broderick’s rippling fingerpicking is similar, his sung whisper can break into a lupine wail; at his best, he evokes the experimental intimacy of Arthur Russell’s World of Echo recordings.
As “With the Notes in My Ears” opened like “Homeward Bound”, Simon & Garfunkel was another reference point, although Broderick is often both rolled into one, and they didn’t sample “my ninth-grade clay whistle” or devices that sound like the rejects box in Toy Story for effect. If it’s tempting to regard Broderick – who was, he said, the only person at this gig not “in love” – as the lonely toymaker surrounded by his gadgets, the ambiguous emotional goings-on of “Below It” and “Games”, and his poignant playing, scotch any notion of purely mechanical precocity. That and the fact I bet he’d like to get it on with Susanna, tonight’s occasional harmony singer.
After his one-man choral procession round the nave finished with him whirling a plastic tube that whined eerily, the crowd beat on the pews for more but timekeeping prevented an encore. We demand an extra curtain call at Broderick’s next solo show.
