Phil Mongredien 

Public Service Broadcasting: Bright Magic review – mood music, from Weimar to Bowie

Berlin is the inspiration for the band’s inventive if melancholy fourth album
  
  

Public Service Broadcasting.
Public Service Broadcasting. Photograph: Alex Lake

As with its predecessors’ focus on the space race and the British coal industry, there’s a strong thematic concept to Public Service Broadcasting’s Bright Magic. This time it’s a selective history of Berlin, split into three distinct movements: the city’s rise, a celebration of Weimar-era hedonism and a more abstract three-track requiem. Every Valley, released in 2017, felt like a transitional record: the artfully chosen speech samples that had so defined their first two albums were complemented then by a handful of guest singers.

Bright Magic feels like a logical next step, with fewer samples, and the likes of Blixa Bargeld, Nina Hoss and Eera much more foregrounded. The downside is that, for all the invention on display here, J Willgoose Esq and Wrigglesworth have lost some of their USP with this shift in focus.

The Low-era Bowie-inspired The Visitor and Hoss’s reading of a Kurt Tucholsky poem atop an ambient background (Ich und die Stadt) are powerfully melancholic. An impassioned Bargeld is a good match for the industrial throbbing of the Metropolis-referencing Der Rhythmus der Maschinen. But the Weimar-influenced songs are largely unremarkable, and you find yourself yearning for the earlier euphoria of Go! or Spitfire.

Watch the video for Der Rhythmus der Maschinen ft. Blixa Bargeld by Public Service Broadcasting.
 

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