Public Service Broadcasting - The Race For Space

With a new album imminent from Public Service Broadcasting, it's time for a look. The Race For Space is an album from 2015, their second full studio album.

The opening track is a beautifully written choral piece underpinning JFK's famous speech about going to the moon. It makes for a great opener, but reveals little about what's to come.

On Sputnik, the album gets into its stride. Starting out as an extremely sparse piece of electronica, it develops by layering sounds rather than structurally. It works - over 7 minutes the track builds to a convincing conclusion. There's not a lot of harmonic complexity - this is about creating an atmosphere, not changes in tempo or key modulations. No singing - this album is mostly instrumental.

The album uses a lot of spoken word samples to evoke the events of the 1960s (plus a little either side). Their use is mostly pretty well judged.

Let's move on to track 5, EVA. Again, building an atmosphere on a riff, this time guitar-based. This is a great track, and more varied than before - I particularly like the sequence where it drops out into a solo piano.

Track 6 is another builder, starting with a single repeated synth and gradually adding other elements, including some lovely clean guitar sounds. Track 7 does have vocals, and really benefits from them. This is one of my favourite tracks on the album, especially in its closing section.

What are my overall impressions? Well, the music is great. However, I do think the spoken word stuff is mixed too loud and at times quite intrusive. I find myself wishing the guy would shut up and let me listen. A 'less is more' approach would in my opinion have improved things. But this is a very good album, well-focussed on its subject matter and convincing as a whole. Thoroughly recommended.

Reasons to listen:

  • You're prepared for progressive rock to, well, progress
  • You like atmospheric space rock
  • You're looking for something you can put on in the background
Reasons not to listen:
  • Those voices are too loud
  • Everyone knows that progressive rock died in 1977 after Going For The One and Wind And Wuthering

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