For Fans of… The Low Anthem, Andrew Bird, King Creosote
“Beautiful…” – Uncut Magazine
The State Broadcasters’ eagerly anticipated second album, Ghosts We Must Carry has been released and this is the follow up to their stunning 2009 debut, The Ship and the Iceberg. With the new album having already received reviews from The List, The Sunday Herald and Mojo, this marks another strong release from one of Scotland’s best loved independent labels, Olive Grove Records
To give you a little taster of the album, “Trespassers” is available to stream and download now via the A Badge of Friendship Soundcloud page.
“The “ghosts” in the title are the burdens we carry with us as we get older, the things we’ve done or had done to us that still hurt – actions and memories that occasionally haunt us,” the band say and they execute this theme beautifully. Opener “The Only Way Home” (a tribute to Mark Linkous and Vic Chesnutt) builds layers of sound underneath melancholic vocals. Yet tracks like “Trespassers” and “Kittiwake” pick up the pace bringing a dreamy nostalgic quality that has become the band’s trademark. There are tinges of The Low Anthem in some of the more sombre tracks but in their more upbeat moments the melodies are more akin to Andrew Bird’s “catchier” tunes.
With much of their first album The Ship and The Iceberg having been featured in Scottish independent films – fitting for a band described by Uncut as being “cut straight from a film by Bill (Gregory’s Girl) Forsyth”- in the interim between records the band took time to compose and record the soundtrack for the multi-award winning short Fixing Luka. This piece saw co-songwriter and producer Pete MacDonald taking home the BAFTA New Talent Award for ‘Best Original Score’. The band have also found themselves the subject of a great many admirers with Uncut, The Sunday Express, The List, BBC 6Music’s Gideon Coe, Marc Riley and BBC Radio Scotland’s Vic Galloway amongst them.
Ghosts We Must Carry is released today via Olive Grove.
http://thestatebroadcasters.co.uk/
