Public Service Broadcasting are a very British band. Who else could amalgamate audio and film, largely culled from the British Film Institute, and marry that to beats and grooves concocted by a trio of bespectacled nerd-a-likes, who trade under the old school monikers of J. Willgoose, Esq., Wrigglesworth and JFAbraham?

But, via their successful combination of visuals and dance, and the creation of an excellent live show which they constantly tour, PSB have captured the imagination in this retro-hungry world we live in. Not that they take it too seriously, nor do they wish to wallow in nostalgia. They somehow manage to walk that fine line between the serious and the playful, as initially epitomised by their debut album, Inform – Educate – Entertain and successfully followed by The Race For Space.

On those aforementioned albums, J. Willgoose, Esq., attempted to weave historical research into evocative storytelling, via many audio samples, both old and new. This time he is taking us on a journey down the mine shafts of the South Wales valleys, using the history of coal mining to shine a light on the disenfranchised. It is a record about community and what happens to an area when its lifeblood is ripped from it. It is a metaphor for a much larger, global and social malaise. Willgoose has described the album’s premise as an allegory for today’s “abandoned and neglected communities across the western world”, which have led to a “malignant, cynical and calculating brand of politics.”

Despite having zero ties to the area, or the industry in question, Willgoose was drawn in by the social and political histories as well as the geographical landscape and romanticism of this particular Welsh story. To assist and inform the record’s production, the band conducted interviews with local townspeople in Ebbw Vale about their histories with the mining industry in the region, some of which appear on the album itself. PSB then recorded the album in the former lecture hall of the Ebbw Vale Institute, and enlisted the support of many Welsh artists, including Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradfield, the Beaufort Welsh Choir, Welsh language singer Lisa Jen Brown, Tracyanne Campbell, and the voice of legendary actor Richard Burton, who via his gloriously deep and mellifluous tones can be heard to say: “Every little boy’s ambition in my valley was to become a miner”, at the beginning of the lead and title track.

‘Every Valley’ is typical PSB; enveloping textures of groove-based arpeggio guitar, staccato strings, guitar lines, brass, cascading drums, working itself into a sonic maelstrom, while ‘The Pit’ tries to depict the often brutal and unforgiving working conditions of working in the mines, via dark and thunderous beats, and nosediving noise effects, interspersed with seemingly authoritative voices telling us ‘the future is coal’. By the time we get to ‘People Will Always Need Coal’ and the album’s key track ’Progress’, we are living in optimistic times, as PSB pile on the chugging semi-dance musical narratives, along with passages of more pastoral ambience. It’s euphoric, toe tapping stuff.

But from here until the closing tracks, the story gets bleaker, darker and ultimately tragic, as tracks such as ‘Go to the Road’ and ‘All Out’ details the closure, the strikes, and the fermenting anger and disillusionment amongst the mining communities. However, PSB don’t quite match the mood. ‘Go to the Road’ is rather lifeless and aimless, like a jam that’s not quite found its raison d’être and, although they get nasty and coruscating on ‘All Out’ – like a Sonic Youth in the way they shift gears and utilise big guitar as their main weapon – there is little in the way of the dynamic excitement that those New York legends used to impart. When you hear such striking and profound sentiments such as, “We went on strike for a job. The right to go out of the house in the morning, and go to work”, it deserves a little more musical empathy.

Things do pick up a little when Mr James Dean Bradfield takes the mic on the rocking chug of ‘Turn No More’, a song that could have come out of the Preachers’ studio but which is actually based on a poem by Idris Davies. And ‘They Gave Me A Lamp’, which feature English band Haiku Salut, is a welcome breather, gently jangly guitars, brass and driving bass propel this song along a vaguely krautrock groove (as does ‘Progress’), mirroring the awakening spirit of those working and affected by the collapse of the mining industry and communities involved, helped by tremendously succinct and uplifting audio samples. And the atypical minimalist guitar/bass/drum combo of PSB works well on ‘You + Me’, Lisa Jen Brown’s Welsh vocals coming to the fore.

Apart from Brown’s voice, plus the voice samples dotted throughout, the only Welshness really discernible is via the final a cappella track, ‘Take Me Home’, a song that originates from a Welsh pop duo of the 70s, and which has subsequently been adopted by male voice choirs around the UK. Here, the Beaufort Male Choir are in fine, uplifting voice, the spirited stoicism of the Celts front and centre. “Take me home / Where my heart lies / And let me, let me sing again”.

It’s to their credit that PSB tackle this unlikely subject for what is ostensibly an ambitious concept pop album. And, in many ways, it works very much in the way their first album, by title and in content, set out to do. But, musically, they don’t hit as many bullseyes as they usually do, the resulting sound palette being too often a little lacklustre and shorn of grip-able melodies and hooks. A bloody good effort, mind.

Jeff Hemmings

Read our 2015 interview with Public Service Broadcasting HERE.

Website: publicservicebroadcasting.net
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