Broadcasting From Home

Submitted by Glyn Lewis on 21 June 2017 - 9:39pm

Cover:

Artist:

Penguin Café Orchestra

album-ID:

a_194

Nationality:

Year:

1 984

Release-year:

0000

Num-of-tracks:

Track-listing:

Music for a Found Harmonium*Prelude & Yodel*More Milk*Sheep Dip*White Mischief*In the Back of a Taxi*Music by Numbers*Another One from the Colonies*Air*Heartwind*Isle of View (Music for Helicopter Pilots)*Now Nothing

Length-in-mins:

Nominator:

Bean

meeting-ID:

m_74

Now-num:

2 017

Spotify-URL:

6lD2Vx9UzGNdq2Hs8RAMp2

Short-title:

Broadcasting

nominator-ID:

u_1

Meeting-date:

Thursday, 24 August 2017

MusicBrainz-URL:

861651cf-7068-3838-97a1-dad000640931

Wikipedia-URL:

Broadcasting_from_Home

Spotify-link-type:

album

Discogs-URL:

Penguin-Cafe-Orchestra-Broadcasting-From-Home/master/25075

Allmusic-URL:

broadcasting-from-home-mw0000191265

code

Some global variables used across pages

code

this is code for each album page, to be hidden

review-form data

guest-list data

108

109

117

reviewers-IDs data

-1-

-14-

-13-

77

reviewed by

Glyn Lewis

Orchestral Maneouvres in the Caff

2-6-7-10

3-11-12

One of the attractions for me is that they sit in this unique space – it’s a kind of restrained, polite, somewhat sophisticated, middle class, well-behaved musical style. That might put some people off but its distinctiveness, plus the fact it is arranged nicely and movingly played in places, is what makes it intriguing. It’s got that feel of late 70s / early 80s English avant-garde art-rock, along with a classical strand of almost a modern chamber music, with tidy strumming on banjos and ukuleles, as well as nods to serialist composers like Philip Glass and Michael Nyman. It all adds up to a special thing.

The Ruichi Sajkamoto one Heartwind is probably my favourite on this – as there’s a little bit of a different sound, the combination with a few little effects and touches of electronics I find sets it apart. But they all change from track to track, all quite simple and always restrained, it’s obviously something to colour a background more than grab you by the lapels but that really shouldn’t be a problem should it? The last two are probably the weakest, perhaps they’re just in the wrong place, but that does make it feel like it fizzles out a bit at the end. But by then it had already made its mark as maybe the strongest album from a class English act.
60

reviewed by

Richard Norbury
50

reviewed by

Neil Hornsey

5