Broadcast - Spell Blanket - Collected Demos 2006-2009

In opening up Trish Keenan's private vault of demo recordings made between 2006-2009, Warp close the book of Broadcast with what is the closest we're ever going to get to a fifth album (depending on how you classify albums, of course). It's quite the understatement to describe this as a bittersweet affair. Yes, new Broadcast, albeit in interstitial form, and yes, there's an awful lot of it. And yet the sense of what could have been if only. There's so many potentials revealed here, ends that will never be tied, roads still to be explored, all taken from the back alleys of Keenan's immense creativity. Listening to these 36 (yes, 36!) mostly vocal-led tracks makes a strong case for Broadcast being the most influential British band of the 21st century (and I can't believe I'm even including a FFO list at the foot of these words). Think about everything that's come since Keenan's tragically premature passing - murky purgatorial pop, the return to folk aesthetics, ghostly psychedelia, post-kraut experimentalism, the dreampop revival... It's all captured here, in varying degrees of completion, though still remarkably accessible and replayable given the nature of its origins. Can such an endeavour be understood as "cohesive" and does that even matter? Because it's all born of the same mind from roughly the same period of time, it's not really something we need worry about. Remarkably, there's still the sense that Keenan's best music was still in front of her. And it makes a lot of sense for Warp to release as one monolithic whole, for it assumes nothing of Keenan's intentions for these songs other than they one day be heard. Maybe not quite like this, but here we are. The desire to imagine what could have been feels like a very human emotion, and Spell Blanket very much plays to that impulse while also giving us a lot more than we really could have hoped for. RIP Trish Keenan. What a real one.