If Enya did a cover version of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Streets of Philadelphia’, it would sound very similar to ‘Funny’ by Broncho. The video for ‘Funny’ is like something you’d stumble upon on MTV2 at 1am in the mid 90s. Even the font is blurry. Frontman Ryan Lindsey looks at the camera while on the dancefloor, as if bemused to be the subject of an anthropological study – he just wants to enjoy some quiet, possibly chemically influenced moments. It’s, well, funny, and the track itself is a gorgeous haze.
It’s hard to believe that the same band is responsible for the daft Buggles-like hit ‘Class Historian’. The opening track on Natural Pleasure, the band’s fifth album, is ‘Imagination’, which has the drifting ambience of Louis Armstrong’s ‘We Have All The Time In The World’. Imagine an advert for bubble bath, or a dreamy 70s movie montage, or a steamboat trip through the mist on the Mississippi River. Lindsey’s ethereal voice and mostly-imperceptible lyrics alone communicate a delight in being lost. Lost in a moment we can never recover (unless we play the song again).
‘Cool’ reminded me of the hypnagogic fuzz of Pink Must’s self-titled album released a couple of months ago. If, like imagination, the notion of cool is resistant to a conclusive definition, then ‘Cool’ does an excellent job of staying aloof from preconceived pigeonholes. Is it a jam in the garage that was too interesting to discard? Is it a musical collage instead of a song? Aren’t rhetorical questions like these silly? The PR for Natural Pleasure claims that ‘Get Gone’ might be suitable for ‘impromptu kitchen discos’. Shimmying while washing the dishes? Crunking while sweeping up crumbs? Sounds good to me.
After all that vigorous multi-tasking, you’ll need a breather. Thankfully, ‘I Swear’ provides it. Over gentle bass and distant surf guitar, Lindsey ‘doo doos’ like a toddler channeling The Supremes. ‘Original Guilt’ is, in Lindsey’s words, inspired by ‘growing up in a really Christian part of the country’ (the country being the US and the part being Oklahoma). Slowed-down-Weezer-in-a-cathedral doesn’t trip off the tongue, but it does sum up the song. Similarly, describing ‘Save Time’ as ‘Jane Birkin in Las Vegas lounge band’ saves time.
“You got your mom, and you got me,” Lindsey sings on the leisurely, reverb-drenched ‘You Got Me’. Like on ‘Funny’, his ‘yah yahs’ sound like a group of tipsy angels. The glistening guitar on ‘Think I Pass’ is music from heaven for acolytes of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers and early Sheryl Crow (and Crowded House’s ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’). ‘Surely’ seems to have been recorded on a beach, with waves not crashing but whispering. If you said this was a hitherto undiscovered Elliot Smith track, no one would disbelieve you.
Sigur Rós aren’t renowned for singing campfire songs, but if they were, they would sound like Broncho do on ‘Way Into Magic’, during which Lindsey cryptically claims, “I’m not careful being special.” ‘Dreamin’ is the perfect title for the final song on an album that begins with ‘Imagination’. Once everyone’s finished sparking their purely medicinal cigarettes, they can hold their lighters aloft and sway to ‘Dreamin’ as moonlight renders the ocean porcelain.
The cover of Natural Pleasure is a photo of a bee that appears to have been taken circa 1986. An everyday occurrence magnified. A memory made massive. Natural Pleasure hones in on memories, dreams, imagination, and is blissfully content with the futility of focus. The point isn’t to achieve clarity but to strive to achieve it. Nietzsche or a fridge magnet said that.
Natural Pleasure is out now via Broncho Worldwide
