The Broken Beats “8 Men”

When the trumpets come in after about 3 seconds, the name Broken Beats is exposed as rather irrelevant to the music—to the point that it actually seems to have been attached as an afterthought in an attempt to acquire the same listeners that bought The 3 EPs. You know, kinda hip-hop-ish vibe, alliteration in the band name, that sort of thing?  Maybe. The Hipgnosis-style album art doesn’t exactly detract from that mission, and now that I think about it, neither does the album title—Them Codes…Them Codes prepared me for a bleepy-er bloopy-er affair. What we do get, though, is well-polished, high-falootin’ British soft rock played by Danes, along the lines of Badly Drawn Boy but (thankfully) never devolving into drippy Ashcroft territory—although it does drop by and pay Cousteau a visit now and then. These beats are far from broken; if anything, they’ve been dovetailed together and sanded to a smooth finish. Witness the contradiction on “8 Men” (mp3)

Them Codes…Them Codes is out on Frankfurt-based Hazelwood Records.

Filed under: The Broken Beats