Broken Records - Out On The Water EP

After all the column inches dedicated to them, it’s easy to forget that Broken Records are a relatively new band. A single album into their careers, and they’ve already been consecrated and desecrated a dozen times over. What this EP of demos and B-sides, recorded prior to their debut, serves to remind us is that there’s still a hell of a lot of potential to be mined within the talented Edinburgh outfit. Yes, they sometimes have a tendency to overdo things – a sense of melodrama creeps into Jamie Sutherland’s voice more than once – but here are five mostly excellent songs, peaking with Sutherland’s falsetto on Lessons Never Learnt and the superb instrumental outro of All So Tired. The question is: where to next? [Finbarr Bermingham]