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...