Peter Broderick – Colours of the Night – Album Review by Killian Laher

Peter Broderick is a pretty productive artist by anyone’s standards. Colours of the Night is his eleventh solo album since his debut, Float in 2008. A serial genre-hopper, on his latest he returns to a song-based album, giving Broderick’s voice a fair degree of prominence. It’s an instrument that is something of an acquired taste, its soft, geeky tones can be a little cloying. But the quality and variety of the songwriting carries this album. Even within its confines, he flits between acoustic, brooding folk (Red Earth , fifties-style torch balladry (The Reconnection) and creepy dance-pop (Get On With Your Life, One Way).

Chanted refrains combine well with easy, strummed electric guitar on the title track , while the choral If I Sinned is charmingly odd-sounding. The slow, deliberate guitar on Our Best evokes Bonnie Prince Billy on one of the stronger tracks, while later the brass-tinged More and More has a wonderfully lazy, relaxed feel. But with such an array of styles there is an absence of any standout track.

Broderick will probably never be a mainstream artist, he’s too concerned with his own muse than doing what others might have him do. It’s this that makes him a compelling artist to follow.

1. Red Earth
2. The Reconnection
3. Colours of the Night
4. Get On With Your Life
5. If I Sinned
6. Our Best
7. One Way
8. On Time
9. More and More
10. Rotebode