Peter Broderick – Colours Of The Night
- Written by Rob Crozier
The music business can be hard, just ask Peter Broderick. After completing his previous album and after months of rewrites and re-recordings Broderick was exhausted. However, in order to promote the album the subsequent tour proved too much and he ended up in hospital with a stress-related illness.
He had always prided himself on playing every instrument that appeared on his albums, as well as writing all his own material. However the strain and attention to detail proved too much. Yet sometimes help is where you least expect it. For Peter Broderick, help was in the form of a Swiss hip-hop producer (yes really).
Invited over to Switzerland to relax and recover with an arrangement to record with a collection of local artists seemed like the ideal scenario. It allowed Broderick to recover, regroup and let go of the intense hands-on approach to his work. Having a group of musicians to refresh and rejuvenate as well as provide him with a musical backing that he had never experienced before gave Broderick the perfect platform to deliver a wonderfully fresh album. The result is his latest album, Colours Of The Night.
Tracks such as ‘Colours Of The Night’ show the benefits of this released control as the backing vocals create a harmonic sound which is almost gospel in its construction. This theme continues with the wonderful ‘Get On With Your Life’, although a more simplistic construction, this track has a haunting beauty to it which creates soft vocals and subtle harmonies.
‘If I Sinned’ is almost as religious as the title suggests. Not as powerful or as compelling as previous tracks but it does feature wonderful soaring female vocal as the track build to a crescendo.
A change of direction greets us via ‘Our Way’ which has a lovely rhythm section and even a bit of a groove which proves a bit of respite from the previous soft acoustic tracks. However, the next track ‘On Time’ returns to a slower pace which after the upbeat momentum of the previous tracks makes this one forgettable, even mournful. It’s a shame that Broderick didn’t persist with a more rhythm-based approach as we start to get the feeling that this whole album is somewhat of a healing process.
This is obviously understandable given his background, yet we feel it could have produced a more positive upbeat sound. The Swiss air has allowed him to regain his musical talents and we wish him well in the future. We also hope that his next body of work contains a bit more cheer and a bit less mourning.