TLOBF Loves… The Broken Family Band

There is a special joy in having one of your favourite bands come from the town in which you live. Reviews about The Broken Family Band invariably make mention of their Cambridge roots – possibly because of the incongruity of an East Anglian city most famous for its ancient University being the spawning ground for the UK’s most convincing ‘alt-country’ band. On a personal level, this has meant that I’ve been able to follow their development quite closely over the years, and it was in the small, packed back-room of The Portland Arms in Cambridge last month, whilst watching them play for a local charity fundraiser, that I came to the realisation that they are quite possibly my very favourite current band.

For those of you unfamiliar with their quirky charms, this is a band most often (very justifiably) lauded for the lyrics. If you are a connoisseur of cynicism, bitterness and angst, often leavened by a sarcastic and sometimes outright hilarious wit, then listen on! Over the course of the six albums and EPs so far released (The King Will Build a Disco; Cold Water Songs; Jesus Songs; Balls; Welcome Home Loser and last year’s release Hello, Love), Steven Adams’ more-or-less convincingly accented drawl has taken in recurring themes of car-crash booze and drug fuelled relationships (“The Booze and the Drugs”, “When We’re Dry”, “Hitting Women”, “Mardi Gras Rescue Mission”), devilish messed-up women (“Devil In The Detail”, “Poor Little Thing”, “Give and Take”, “Living in Sin”), and general non-specific twenty- and thirty-something malaise.

Often, a single line can change the mood of a song, to moving or chilling effect. In “Twisted”, for example, the singer’s insecure questioning of his lover (“Would you love me more if I was prettier?”) turns altogether darker and sadder with the line “If you shut your eyes, am I still there? / Will your thoughts soon be turned on someone else?”. “Alone in the Make Out Room” starts out as an obviously humorous duet with a couple trading insults and wishing harm on each other, but when Adams delivers the line “I want to leave you at the side of the road / Or out in a field in the rain and the snow / And people walking past could come and take pictures” he suddenly sounds like he really seriously means it. Darker yet is the whole second verse of “It’s All Over” which starts off as a seemingly simple ‘break up’ song and then rapidly morphs into stalker territory (“I could bind your beautiful wrists / And shut your beautiful eyes / With the drugs, with the drugs, with the drugs”).

Other songs deliver “punch lines” that have genuinely been known to cause out-loud laughter on first listen. I won’t spoil the joke, but take a listen to “Living in Sin” (from Welcome Home Loser), for example.

They also do genuinely touching love songs (“Kissing In The Rain”, “Yer Little Bedroom”, and the beautiful “Leaps” which sings the praises of a bit of conjugal slap an’ tickle), and ballads full of malaise and sorrow (“John Belushi” – a candidate for my favourite of all their songs), yet never stray into mawkish or cheesy territory, unless deliberately pastiching the more redneck aspects of country music (prime example: “Don’t Leave That Woman Unattended”).

Adams has a great, expressive voice, capable of switching from world-weary to harmonious and melodic within a single song. The band have also greatly benefited from a series of cracking female vocal collaborators on most of their releases, (Stacy Gow, Inge Thomson, Piney Gir) who further enhance the seemingly endless supply of gorgeous tunes that they are capable of producing.

This is a band that I have been listening to, and watching live, for the last six years, and they’ve not yet released anything that I have not grown to love.

mp3:> The Broken Family Band: “You Get Me”
mp3:> The Broken Family Band: “I’m Thirsty”