Release Date: Apr 20, 2009
Genre(s): Indie, Rock
Record label: Cooking Vinyl
Music Critic Score
How the Music Critic Score works
Buy Please And Thank You from Amazon
Clinching the Broken Family Band’s gradual transmogrification from oddball indie-country act to snide, laid-back garage-rockers, Please and Thank You is a refreshing draught of sharp guitar-based pop. Charming but never cloying, smart but never pretentious, this breezy East Anglian outfit casually tosses off the sort of lo-fi spontaneity and low-key passion that most American indie acts sweat and struggle to reconstruct. Imagine if someone started a band that actually earned all of those hyperventilating accolades that music critics lobbed at Vampire Weekend’s merely ordinary debut.
"Keep on choogling," command the Broken Family Band on a track called Borrowed Time, as if it were 1967 and they'd just been smoking banana skins with the Grateful Dead. That's the charm of the BFB: despite being youngish and English, they are the next best thing to ancient American hippies. Unless Britain develops an appetite for wry Americana produced by men from Cambridge, they'll probably stay under the radar, but this seventh album is required listening for anyone with a penchant for observational lyrics sung in an impossibly world-weary voice.
is available now