'Brighter Now' is the forth album (hard to believe!) by the North London duo of Martine Roberts and Clive Painter, who have dreamed one giant flowing stream of bliss since around 1996, and surely helped more than one soul retain it's equlibrium under the duress of the everyday. Their singular gift seems to be the ability to marry the independent musical cinema of Americans like Mazzy Star, the Cowboy Junkies and Low to the kind of dense orchestrated studio-craft of the Slowdive and Loveless-period My Bloody Valentine. They'd probably kill me for the reference, but Julee Cruise is definetely echoed by Martine's vocals, if not instrumentally. Things are not hurried here, and that is a good thing.
'The Sleepers Sleep' fairly barrels along for a Broken Dog song , although the subject matter insures it functions as a lullaby anyway. 'How Can I Explain?' is the pure narcotic deal, waves of gauze needing to be fought through to reach the shadowy figure at the end of it and lift her veil. The ironic dismissal of the Drake legacy (it's 'Brighter Now' not 'Brighter Layter' they are surely conveying with the title) does not convince us here as their tracks in the snow follow Drake's until they are erased by the wind. Their confidence and distance travelled are evident on the extraordinary 'Home is a Crevice in the Grass' (look, I'm not even going to try and picture that), where angel vocals float over an exquisite lounge-jazz arrangement for keyboards, guitars and trumpet and I'm put in mind of Movietone's superb 'Day and Night' record a few years back. Their is a quiet intensity to 'Memory Lanes' that builds from the insistance of Clive Painter's guitar orchestrations and rides the cold fire of Martine's vocals. It's beautiful and feverish like the last moments of a nightclub in a city on fire. Orchestrating touches are the key on 'Brighter Now', like the clarinet on 'Brilliant Things' every touch is fated and significant. Despite when you might expect from a band lumped in the lo-fi, this record is beautifully recorded at their own Animal studios, and polished of in the mastering suite at Abbey Road. Sonically it is a trip, as befits a band that one imagines in the guise of house band for the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Ready yourself for starburst.

Whilst the Velvet Underground seems to be the favourite act on everyone's lips for the purpose of comparison to the Noo Wave from the states - often, no doubt, from people who wouldn't know a Velvet Underground song if it bit them on their Strokes T-shirt - I'm afraid that this writer must, once again, use the band's music as a reference point.
The gently strumming guitar - with just a soupcon of feedback - accompanying Martine Roberts' forlorn voice throughout 'Brighter Now' is just so reminiscent of Nico's offering of barbed poetry drifting across the ill-controlled crescendo behind her, soft eerie numbers swirling around the room, desperate to sink their ice-crystal claws into something solid, but drifting away, not quite finding their grip, fading away before the next gentle assault on the ears tumbles from the speakers.
After the lack of recognition on their previous label - the admirable, but toothless, Piao! - this, their fourth album, should see them climb from the file marked 'Cranes/Sundays: Whatever happened to...?' and establish themselves as a more recognisable feature on the English music map.

I bet if they were from Detroit we'd hear more about them...

It's a brave band that will so obviously refer to a Nick Drake album title, given that Drake is currently riding high in both the Most Often Refered To As An Influence and the Current Reputation Dwarfs Actual Success charts; but Broken Dog are clearly confident enough to update Bryter Layter as Brighter Now. Mind you, the music doesn't suggest that it is even slightly brighter now. Fragile, vulnerable and just plain sad, the songs seem to concern a life of missed opportunities. What makes it all work is Martine Roberts' voice - exactly halfway between breathing and singing - Clive Painter's guitar-playing, extraordinarily muscular for such quiet slo-core fare, and the naggingly addictive way Broken Dog's psych-folk is played with the exaggerated determination of a sitcom drunk trying to get his keys in the front door.

You emerge from the rubble more alive than you began. You begin to see dizzy lights emerge from the distant corners of your eyes. Colours bleed into mindmelts, ambiguities smear into stark truths and you start to wonder precisely why more bands don't have such haunted and heightened pace, this easy shadow-boxer grace.
'Brighter Now' is the fourth album of stormy slowcore from Broken Dog, the fantastically fluid duo of Martine Roberts and Clive Painter. It works because they sound like they're doing you a favour by being here. The likes of 'Home Is A Crevice In The Grass', with it's lilted Galexie 500 beauty boldly adhorned with a jazzy sense of sensibility, and the distant twinkle of 'Memory Lanes', so somnolent you get the impression you could bulldoze through on a HGV and it'd still lay prettily in the corner laying pirouettes on your synapses. Roberts' breathy inflections are the key: both broad and brittle, vibrant and verdant, instant and eerie simultaneously, when she wiggles her tongue you step into a trance: and the music does her justice with a glorious strut of understated sonic invention, and a sense of pride, aplomb, and sheer style absent from the timid trickle of the UK underground in 2001.
Implicite somewhere herein, I'm sure, is that they then ask you to turn pop's denial of truth, it's lust for the blurring of lines into spiderwebs, into an absolute. And for once, it isn't a paradox, just another bootstomp on for this all-consuming, total triumph.

Listening to Broken Dog is like being borne away on little white fluffy clouds. Martine Roberts' breathy off-kilter vocals linger above the stripped down guitar, with jarring harmonies in songs like 'Home Is A Crevice In The Grass', which is virtually an avant-jazz number with trumpets and piano. The album flutters between pretty ballads (envoking bands like Sixpence None The Richer - and I mean that in a good way, Low and Empress) and full on indie-pop numbers (echoing bands like the Aislers Set) with fluidity and ease. Broken Dog have been around for a number of years and have built up a reputation on the live circuit but this time around they want to take center stage. This album definately brings them out of their shell. If quiet is the new loud, the Broken Dog are shouting from the rooftops.

No, not Backyard Dog, but Broken Dog; neither 'bad' nor 'ruff', but a rather more skinny, sad-eyed and lost breed.
Broken Dog's Clive Painter and Martine Roberts are a sensitive pair who've tenderly eked out a non-career at the smudged margins of London sadcore. They used to prop up the only-fractionally-less-obscure Tram, and 'Brighter Now', presumably a reference to Nick Drake's seminal 'Bryter Layter', is their fourth, home-produced album of frail, hazy mood music.
Such a delicate undertaking can only work by stealth. 'The Sleepers Sleep' wanders off in a pastoral direction, all chiming guitar and spangly atmospherics, Martine's tremulous tones burbling what might be a fable. This slightness gracefully gives way to more tangled orchestration, as though the elderflower wine were finally kicking in. The excellent 'How Can I Explain?' is a dreamy, fearful swoon, like My Bloody Valentine slumbering in a field of violets; after this, the album features petal-soft near-psychedelia, some sour times and even two tunes about drinking.
But for all the heady charm and intense subtlety at work here, there's a great deal of treacle and torpor too. Broken Dog have one mood: melancholy, and one vision: blured. Lying down, it's an appealing combination. Upright, however, 'Brighter Now' looks a little one-dimensional.