Aug 15 2008 11:29 am,
Our Broken Garden
‘When Your Blackening Shows’
(Bella Union)
Fronted by the near-heavenly voice of Anna Bronsted, Our Broken Garden’s debut album began life in an abandoned school. Like another one of 2008’s most sumptuous records – Bon Iver’s ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’, which was written in a remote log cabin in Wisconsin – ‘When Your Blackening Shows’ is clearly influenced by the surroundings in which it was conceived. Portentous and desolate, yet enveloped in a warmth of gentle, atmospheric and icy orchestration (courtesy of bandmates Søren Bigum and Moogie Johnson), it’s a debut album which pits the opposites of human experience and emotion against each other – ominous yet beautiful ballads in which light and darkness co-exist gracefully yet tentatively, patiently waiting for the balance, like their garden, to be broken.
Mischa Pearlman
