Broken Records
Until the Earth Begins to Part
V2 Records
Until the Earth Begins to Part, the debut full-length album by the septet Broken Records, sounds a little like a lot of artists, but the combination is nothing short of brilliant.
The opener, “Nearly Home” starts with a string quartet and slowly builds until vocalist Jamie Sutherland takes the song and propels it to its glorious climax.
The title track sounds like it came straight off of a Hope for the States album with the lead singer of ’90s alt-rock group Cool for August taking the lead. While “Thoughts on a Picture (In a Paper, January 2009)” is the band at their finest with Sutherland pleading “If the righteous steal your bones,” he never tells us what to do if that happens. His voice is so convincing though, that it doesn’t really matter.
“If Eilert Loevborg Wrote a Song, It Would Sound Like This” apparently means that Loevborg would have been in Arcade Fire. This is as close to plagiarism as the group gets.
Until the Earth Begins to Part is anthemic without being pretentious. This seven-piece band from Edinburgh, Scotland has been called the “Scottish Arcade Fire” by NME. The instrumentation and combination of odd instruments, like the violin, cello, trumpet, mandolin, and accordion, along with Sutherland’s Jeff Buckley-meets-Win Butler’s vocals gives you Arcade Fire meets Hope for the States. Broken Records has set themselves up to hit it big and judging by their sound, they already have a soundtrack in place.
Broken Records: http://www.brokenrecords.com
