The Broken Family
Band – ‘Welcome Home, Loser’ (Track & Field)
(Feb '05)
No, they’re not a real family. They are merely four blokes from old bands based around Cambridge, now releasing their second full-length album. But, besides taking the trad set-up of a musical dynasty to its 21st century conclusion – a split – this bunch subvert the other clichés of country music, to yield a homegrown goodness. So they might sing those familiar themes of religion, romance and booze, but do so with a warm and biting humour. For instance, the tongue-in-cheek track ‘Living in Sin’ is a song about dating a Satanist. Meanwhile, the hoe-down ‘Happy Days are Here Again’ has darkness behind the banjo. “The sun has got his hat on... woah!” Savour the bitterness of their Fenland whine!
It’s not all beer and spittle. With the Band’s background in intense indie-rock, ‘Honest Man’s Blues’ could be compared to Radiohead soundtracking O Brother Where Art Thou? A better comparison would be more emotional. Some lyrics bear traces of deliberate cheese, but there’s more to them than raucous hollering: check the harmony on ‘Where the Hell is My Baby?’, and their romantic semantics (‘We Already Said Goodbye’, and ‘Yer Little Bedroom’, lolloping along like Neil Young’s ‘Southern Man’). They have some touching sentiment; and not a party-country mouth-organ in sight. ‘John Belushi’, in fact, is all about taking time out, and the more morose ‘A Princess’ is a-crawling out of the comedown. “Drunk and stupid…” This quiet tone, as other critics have suggested, is closest to the slow Mormon-rock of Low.
It’s an album of various moods, and the more desperate songs might jar slightly (‘One Last Song’); and as with a lot of country music, it’s more enjoyable for this listener when the Band sing about a jam than when they get into one (‘Coping With Fear’ a very long ending, full of feedback but low on speed or subtlety). 'Wherever You Go', however, with the titular chorus of "welcome home, loser", has a sarcastic charm all its own. Its beauty is aided by the Family’s friends and other creatures at the Sickroom studios in deepest East Anglia, where the birds in the trees should get royalty fees.
So no, they’re not a real
Family Band, but perhaps the Broken music route should come recommended
by marriage counsellors. The family that plays together, stays together.
And even while playing such silly word games, this lot win at touching
hearts. It's very good, y'know. Welcome back…
