OUR BROKEN GARDEN - Golden Sea

Anna Brønsted is without doubt one of the most fascinating among the new female voices currently around. This claim, which can serve as a starting point for approaching her new album "Golden Sea", was already clear from the previous "When Your Blackening Shows", the work with which the Danish pianist and keyboardist - already a collaborator of Efterklang - embarked on a solo path under the name Our Broken Garden.

A more or less direct offshoot of that record, "Golden Sea" presents an artist in search of greater depth and articulation for the dreamy ballads that had characterised her excellent debut; in particular, her voice is here immersed in dense electronic textures and darker, more sinister atmospheres, which also recur in the eschatological themes that mark many of the lyrics.

The result is a work poised between attempts to lend Brønsted's soft melodies a dark, solemn setting, and winks towards an electro-pop with greater crossover potential, following, for instance, in the footsteps of Björk or Bat For Lashes. This latter intent, not necessarily deplorable in itself, nonetheless represents a factor that alters the qualities for which the Our Broken Garden project had become known and appreciated. Although most of the tracks on "Golden Sea" retain Anna Brønsted's fluid piano melodies and languid vocalising, the ethereal atmospheres thus outlined are repeatedly overwhelmed by percussion and electronic beats, or dissolved into what are meant to be dreamy synthetic gusts but end up as plasticky blankets that flatten the character of tracks which, for long stretches of the record, already lack distinctiveness in their writing.

So, while the opening of "The Departure" raises hopes with its evanescent piano melodies, the same theatrical arching of the performances on "In The Lowlands" and "The Fiery And Loud" is undermined - in the first case by a percussion section that feels detached from the rest of the track, and in the second by electronic pulses that overlap the strings, coming across as cold and grating. The blend of electro-(dream-)pop and trip-hop partly succeeds on the Björk-esque "Garden Grow", while from there on the tracklist loses itself in saccharine sweetness ("The Burial", "Share") and a substantial flatness, devoid of ideas except for an artificial reshaping of dreamy sounds.

Besides writing that isn't particularly effective, the most evident shortcomings of "Golden Sea" can be summed up in the depersonalising production overlays and the lack of cohesion in the rhythmic parts, which suffer from having been put together by different musicians, resulting in rhythms that are clearly poorly coordinated with the structures of the songs.

Anna Brønsted still has a lovely voice, but in this case that alone isn't enough to make a worthwhile record.

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21/10/2010