STREAM | New albums from Broadcast and Erin McKeown

January 1, 2013 by Alan Pedder in Blog

2013 is getting off to a fairly quiet start, release-wise. Things aren’t due to really pick up until the end of the month, but NPR are currently streaming two records of note that are coming out sooner: Broadcast’s Berberian Sound Studio, out January 7, and Erin McKeown’s Manifestra, out January 14.

Composed by Broadcast before Trish Keenan’s tragic death two years ago, Berberian Sound Studio is an original soundtrack to Peter Strickland’s 2012 film of the same name – an homage to 1970s Italian horror that The Guardian called “a musique concrète nightmare, a psycho-metaphysical implosion of anxiety, with strange-tasting traces of black comedy and movie-buff riffs…seriously weird and seriously good.”

Listen here.

Manifestra is Erin McKeown’s seventh studio album, and finds the Boston-born artist uniting “her political and musical selves” with all the colour and sharp songwriting we’ve come to expect from this vibrant, funk-loving folk hero. Explaining the album title to Improper Bostonian late last year, McKeown said, “I never doubted it, like ‘Do I mean manifesto?—no, it’s a manifestra. Opera’s in there; manifesto’s in there; and I love the word fenestra, which means window. There’s a kind of opening in it for me.”

Listen here.

Download an alternative version of album track ‘Proof’ below.