Like the golden sea that names Our Broken Garden’s new album, their music is wide and deep, beautiful and mysterious, its thermal currents inviting you to dive in but with the potential to drag you under…
Hailing from Denmark, Our Broken Garden is the sound of sometime Efterklang keyboardist Anna Bronsted’s bewitching voice and songs with Søren Bigum’s guitar/keyboards and Moogie Johnson’s bass, plus assorted musical friends. Following the Lost Sailor debut EP, their debut album When The Blackening Shows arrived in 2008. Anna’s connection to water began here, with various nautical references in her lyrics, and a deeply atmospheric, drifting ebb and flow to the sound, with a serene, torchy Anna resembling a modern day siren at its heart.
With Anna co-producing for the first time, Golden Sea was recorded at OBG’s shared house in the Danish countryside, with different drummers (Poul Terkildsen, from When Your Blackening Shows, plus Søren Poulsen, Fridolin Nordsø and Yossi Karutchi), Robert Karlsson and Morten Svenstrup (from Under Byen) on strings and Palle Hjorth on the local church organ.
Golden Sea is a substantial step forward for the band. There’s more drama and rhythm this time around - check ‘Garden Grow’ and ‘The Feral’ for clear proof - as if the golden sea was more restless and darker than its colour suggests. Anna puts the change down to wanting to recreate the romantic and grandiose feel of classical music. You can immediately hear that on the opening ‘The Departure’, with its undulating piano undertow and hymnal beauty. The violins that distinguish ‘The Feral’ could be Haydn, but the vocal style and melody is pure modern-day Scandinavia. Talking of which, Anna adds that she also saw [film director] Lars Von Triers’ Antichrist at the beginning of writing Golden Sea, “and I was very moved and influenced by it. It's so graceful and overwhelmingly dreadful at the same time.”
Download: Garden Grow
Hailing from Denmark, Our Broken Garden is the sound of sometime Efterklang keyboardist Anna Bronsted’s bewitching voice and songs with Søren Bigum’s guitar/keyboards and Moogie Johnson’s bass, plus assorted musical friends. Following the Lost Sailor debut EP, their debut album When The Blackening Shows arrived in 2008. Anna’s connection to water began here, with various nautical references in her lyrics, and a deeply atmospheric, drifting ebb and flow to the sound, with a serene, torchy Anna resembling a modern day siren at its heart.
With Anna co-producing for the first time, Golden Sea was recorded at OBG’s shared house in the Danish countryside, with different drummers (Poul Terkildsen, from When Your Blackening Shows, plus Søren Poulsen, Fridolin Nordsø and Yossi Karutchi), Robert Karlsson and Morten Svenstrup (from Under Byen) on strings and Palle Hjorth on the local church organ.
Golden Sea is a substantial step forward for the band. There’s more drama and rhythm this time around - check ‘Garden Grow’ and ‘The Feral’ for clear proof - as if the golden sea was more restless and darker than its colour suggests. Anna puts the change down to wanting to recreate the romantic and grandiose feel of classical music. You can immediately hear that on the opening ‘The Departure’, with its undulating piano undertow and hymnal beauty. The violins that distinguish ‘The Feral’ could be Haydn, but the vocal style and melody is pure modern-day Scandinavia. Talking of which, Anna adds that she also saw [film director] Lars Von Triers’ Antichrist at the beginning of writing Golden Sea, “and I was very moved and influenced by it. It's so graceful and overwhelmingly dreadful at the same time.”
Download: Garden Grow
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